17 Text
While
not really an advanced technique, adding text to pictures in
Photoshop does automatically create a separate layer, so I've waited
until now to discuss it.
This
is a book cover of mine. I've just used the Text tool (it looks like
a capital T) to add the text. It's two separate lots of text so it's
two separate layers.
The
font I've picked is Trajan Pro (bold) but there are hundreds of
others. Flat
text is boring so I'm going to make this 3D and gold.
In
the Layers Window, right-click on one of the text layers and select
Blending Options.
This
gives you a hole range of effects to play with. The one I've used
here is Bevel and Emboss. There are sliders again for how much and
how big and... you'll see.
The
second effect I've added is a colour overlay in a sort of ochre
yellow that looks very gold (yellow being too yellow). I had to move
the opacity slider to 50% to make the colour transparent enough for
the bevelling to show through.
The
final effect is convincingly 3D and metallic.
Here's
an example of the Text Warping tool. I started with plain horizontal
text, warped it and added just a little bevel to lift the characters
off the background. I added a pebble texture too and a rainbow
gradient overlay instead of a flat colour.
An
important detail when adding effects that involve shadows is the
direction the light is coming from in the photograph. Photoshop lets
us set the direction of the notional light source for these effects
so it's easy to match the light and shadow in the background image.
What is more, we get a choice of setting that globally, for all the
effects we're using, or we can set different light sources in
different layers. If that doesn't sound massively useful, consider
this example.
Taken
at a venue with two spot lights, I wanted to make the text appear
truly floating.
Simple
really: Add the plain text, add a bit of bevel (I like bevels) and a
Drop Shadow with about 50% opacity and light from the left. I moved
the Distance slider to about 180 (pixels) to put the shadow a long
way back from the text, moved the Spread slider to 3 to make the
shadow's edges just a little fuzzy and the Size slider to 10 to make
the shadow just a bit bigger than the text.
That's
one shadow done. For the second one, I duplicated the whole text
layer. Two identical layers overlap perfectly so it still looks like
only one word. I changed the Drop Shadow settings on the second text
layer, unticking the little box marked “Use Global Light”,
sliding the opacity down to 35%, the light source round to the right,
the Distance out to 240, Spread to 8 and Size to 12. The second
shadow is fainter, further away, fuzzier and a touch bigger. All
reflecting the presence of two bright lights, left and right of the
grumpy old Leicester fan.
Its
all a lot easier to do than it is to explain.
This time, the text is
simple but the background has been selectively lightened using the
elliptical selection tool and the Lightness slider in the
Hue/Saturation tool. Handy if you fancy making your own photo-stories
or memes.
Before
I get off the subject of text, I have one final example to share with
you. It's a very subtle example of the use of text. It's a cover
image for a screen play and, while the text for the title and my name
is basic enough, it's not obvious that the hearts carved into the
marble of her hip are text too.
Using
careful scaling of a heart shaped character from the Wingdings font,
I was trying to make the hearts appear part of the statue.
Symbolically,
it refers to the protagonist's tattoos. I
think they blend in rather convincingly.