Soft shadows are shadows with a graduated penumbra rather than a single hard edge, produced when a light source has physical area rather than being an idealised point. Rendering them requires sampling multiple points across the light’s surface, or approximating the effect with techniques such as percentage-closer soft shadows, variance shadow maps, or area-light ray tracing. They are a significant contributor to perceived realism in rendered scenes because hard-edged shadows are rare under natural lighting conditions. Real-time soft shadow techniques trade accuracy for performance, while offline and ray-traced renderers can compute them with physically accurate light transport as part of global illumination.