The way that I create shadows is by the following technique: http://www.catalinzima.com/2010/07/my-technique-for-the-shader-based-dynamic-2d-shadows/

But I have questions to HLSL. The way that I currently do it is, I have a black and white image, where Black means 'object', and white means 'nothing'. I then distort the image like in the tutorial. I do this with a pixel shader, but instead of rendering to the screen, I render to a texture, back to my application. I then take this, and create the shadows, and then send it back to the graphics card to undo the distortion, after the shadow has been added - this comes back and I have a stencil of shadow. I can put this ontop of the original image and send them back to the graphics card, which then puts them on the screen.

To me this is alot of back and forth. Is there a way i can avoid this?

The problem that I am having is that I need to basically go through all positions in the texture 3 times, and use the new new texture every time instead of the orginal one. I tried to read up on Passes, but i don't think that i am heading in the right direction there.

Help?