Stop CALayer shadow from affecting subviews?

This happens when parent view has alpha less than 1.0 or has no background color (i.e is set to clear color). In that case shadow translates to subviews. See my answer here for more details.

Apple Docs prove this:

Figure A-7 shows several different versions of the same sample layer with a red shadow applied. The left and middle versions include a background color so the shadow appears only around the border of the layer. However, the version on the right does not include a background color. In this case, the shadow is applied to the layer’s content, border, and sublayers.

its easy just change your subviews parent.

in other words make new parent above the your transparent shadow View and insert the subViews to this new parent view.