Elements makes it easy to add text to your images. You can quickly create all kinds of fancy text to use in greeting cards, as newsletter headlines, or as graphics for web pages.
Elements gives you lots of ways to jazz up your text: you can apply Layer styles, effects, and gradients to it, or warp it into psychedelic shapes. And the Type Mask tools let you fill individual letters with the contents of a photo. Best of all, most Type tools let you change your text with just a few clicks (see Figure 14-1). By the time you finish this chapter, you’ll know all the ways that Elements can add pizzazz to your text.
Elements 10 brings three exciting new tools for making artistic text: Text on Selection, Text on Shape, and Text on Custom Path. With these tools, you can create text that swoops and turns, or make text run around the edge of an object in your photo. You can create very dramatic text effects with these tools. They’re covered beginning on Artistic Text.
Figure 14-1. With Elements, you can take basic text and turn it into the kind of snazzy headlines you see on greeting cards and magazine covers. It took only a couple of clicks—a couple of Layer styles (Angled Spectrum and a bevel) and some warping—to turn these plain black letters (top) into an extravaganza (bottom).
It’s a cinch to add text to an image in Elements. Just activate the Type tool, choose a font from the Options bar, and type away. The Type tool’s icon in the Tools panel is easy to recognize: It’s a capital T. (It lives just above the Crop tool or to the left of the Crop tool, depending on whether you have one or two columns of tools.) Elements actually gives you seven different Type tools, all of which you can see in the Type tool icon’s pop-out menu: the Horizontal Type tool, the Vertical Type tool, the Horizontal Type Mask tool, the Vertical Type Mask tool, Text on Selection, Text on Shape, and Text on Custom Path.
You’ll learn about the Type Mask and “Text on…” tools later in this chapter (see Type Masks: Setting an Image in Text); this section focuses on the regular Horizontal and Vertical Type tools. As their names imply, the Horizontal Type tool lets you enter text that runs left to right, while the Vertical Type tool is for creating text that runs down the page.
When you use the Type tools, Elements automatically puts your text on its own layer, which makes it easy to throw out what you’ve typed and start over again. When the Type tool is active, Elements creates a new Text layer each time you click in your image.
Activate either the Horizontal or Vertical Type tool, and then take a look at the many Options bar settings (Figure 14-2) These choices let you control pretty much every aspect of your text, including its font, color, and alignment. Your choices from left to right are:
Font Family. Choose your font here. Elements lists all the fonts installed on your computer.
Tip
The font family menu displays the word “Sample” in the actual fonts to make it easier for you to find the one you want. To see all your choices, in the Options bar, click the down arrow to the right of the font name box. You can adjust the size of these previews by going to Edit→Preferences→Type/Adobe Photoshop Elements Editor→Preferences→Type.
Font Style. Here’s where you select the styles available for your font, like bold or italic.
Size. This is where you choose how big the text should be. Text is traditionally measured in points—that’s what the “pt” here stands for. (The box on How Resolution Affects Font Size explains the relationship between points and actual size in Elements.) You can choose a preset sizes from the drop-down menu, or just type in the size you want. You aren’t limited to the sizes shown in the menu—you can enter any number you want.
Anti-aliasing. This setting smoothes the edges of your text. Turn it on or off by clicking the little square with the two As on it. Anti-aliasing is explained on The Magic Wand, but usually you want it turned on.
Faux Styles. Yup, faux as in “fake.” If your chosen font doesn’t have a bold, italic, underline, or strikethrough version, you can tell Elements to simulate that style by clicking the appropriate icon here. (This option isn’t available for some fonts.)
Justification. This drop-down menu tells Elements how to align your text, just like in a word-processing program. If you enter multiple lines of text, this is where you tell Elements whether you want it lined up left, right, or centered (for horizontal text). If you select the Vertical Type tool, you can align along the top, bottom, or middle instead.
Tip
If you’re using the Vertical Type tool, each time you start a new column, Elements puts it to the left of the previous one, so your columns run from right to left. If you want vertical text columns that run left to right instead, you need to put each column on its own layer and position them manually. You can use the Move tool’s Distribute option to space them evenly (Aligning and Distributing Layers).
Leading (rhymes with “bedding”). This setting controls the spacing (measured in points) between the lines of text. For horizontal text, leading is the difference between the baselines (the bottom of the letters) of each line. For vertical text, leading is the distance from the center of one column to the center of the column next to it. Figure 14-3 shows what a difference leading can make. Elements automatically sets the leading to Auto, which is the program’s guess about what looks best. You can change the leading by choosing a number from the list or by entering the amount you want (in points, unless you changed the measurement unit in Elements’ preferences).
Figure 14-3. Leading is the space between lines of text. Top: A list of four items with Auto leading. Bottom: The same list with the leading set to a higher number to make more space between the rows. If you adjust the leading of vertical text, you change the space between the columns, rather than between letters within each column. The box on page 482 explains how to tighten up the space between letters that are stacked vertically.
Color. Click this square to bring up the Color Picker and set the color of your text. Or, click the arrow to the right of this square to bring up Color Swatches. When you make a selection, the Foreground color square changes to reflect your choice.
Tip
When the Type tool’s cursor is active in your image (so you see a blinking line showing where letters will appear if you type), you can’t use the standard keyboard commands to reset your Foreground and Background colors to black and white (X) or to switch them (D). (If you try to use the shortcuts, you’ll simply type those letters in your image.) Instead, you have to click the relevant buttons in the Tools panel (Choosing Colors).
Warp. The little T-above-a-curved-line icon hides a bunch of options for distorting your text in lots of interesting ways. There’s more about this option on Warping Text. (The Warp Text command is also available from Layer→Type→Warp Text.) This button is grayed out until you actually type something.
Orientation. This button, which has a T and two arrows on it, changes your text from horizontal to vertical, or vice versa. You can also change text’s orientation by going to Layer→Type→Horizontal or Vertical. You can’t change the orientation of text that doesn’t exist yet, so this setting is grayed out until you add some.
Style. You can add funky visual effects to text with Layer styles (Adding Layer Styles). First, add some text to your image, and then, in the Options bar, click the Commit button (the green checkmark). Next, click the Style box and choose a Layer style from the pop-out palette. (If you want to remove a style that you’ve just applied, click the double arrows in the upper-right corner of the palette and choose Remove Style from the pop-out menu, or go to Layer→Layer Style→Clear Layer Style.)
These two choices don’t show up in the Options bar until you’ve typed something:
Cancel. When you add text to your image, Elements automatically places the text on its own layer. Click this button (the red circle with a slash) to delete this newly created Text layer. This button works only if you click it before you click the Commit button (described next). To delete text after you’ve committed it, head to the Layers panel and drag the Text layer onto the trashcan icon.
Commit. Click this green checkmark after you type on your image to tell Elements that yes, you want the text to stay the way it is.
If you see either of these buttons in the Options bar, that means you haven’t committed your text, and many menu selections and other tools won’t be available until you do. When you see these buttons, you’re in what Elements calls Edit mode, where you can make changes to the text, but most of the rest of Elements features aren’t available to you. Just click Commit or Cancel to get the rest of the program’s options back.
Now that you’re familiar with the choices in the Options bar, you’re ready to start putting text in your image. You can add text to an existing image or start by creating a new file (if you want to create text to use as a graphic by itself, say). To use either the Horizontal or Vertical Type tools, just follow these steps:
Activate the Type tool.
Click it in the Tools panel or press T, and then select the Horizontal Type tool or the Vertical Type tool from the pop-out menu.
Modify any settings you want to change on the Options bar.
See the list in the previous section for a rundown of your choices. You can make changes after you enter the text, too, so your choices aren’t set in stone yet. Elements lets you edit text until you simplify the Text layer. (Polygon explains what simplifying is.)
Enter your text.
Click in the image where you’d like the text to go and then start typing. Elements automatically creates a new layer for the text. If you’re using the Horizontal Type tool, the horizontal line you see is the baseline the letters sit on. If you’re typing vertically, the vertical part of the cursor is the centerline of the characters.
Type the way you would in a word processor, pressing Enter/Return to create new lines. If you want Elements to wrap the text (adjust it to fit a given space), drag in your image with the Type tool to create a text box before you start typing. Otherwise, you need to insert returns manually. If you create a text box, you can resize it to adjust the text’s flow by dragging the box’s handles after you finish typing. (You won’t be able to do this anymore after you simplify the layer.)
As noted earlier, if you want to use the Vertical Type tool, you can’t make the columns of text run left to right. So if you need several vertical columns of English text, enter one column and then click the Commit button. Then start over again for the next column, so that each column is on its own layer.
Tip
Be careful about clicking when the Type tool is active—each click creates a new Text layer. That’s great if you’re creating lots of separate text boxes to position individually, but it’s easy to create a layer without meaning to. If you accidentally make a new layer, just delete it in the Layers panel, or merge it with your existing Text layer.
Move the text if you don’t like where it is.
Sometimes the text doesn’t end up exactly where you want it. As long as you haven’t committed the text yet, you can move it with the Type tool—just put the cursor below the text and drag. (You’ll know when you’ve found the right spot because the cursor changes from the I-beam text-insertion cursor to one that looks like the Move tool’s cursor.) If you have trouble moving your text, try the Move tool, but note that switching tools automatically commits your text (see step 5). So if you need to move vertical columns of text, wait until after you’ve committed the text to do that.
If you like what you see, click the checkmark in the Options bar to commit the text.
When you commit text, you tell Elements that you accept what you’ve created. The Type tool’s cursor is no longer active in your photo once you commit.
If, on the other hand, you don’t like what you typed, click the Cancel button in the Options bar, and the whole Text layer goes away.
Once you’ve entered text, you can modify it using most of Elements’ editing tools. You can add Layer styles to it (Adding Layer Styles), move it with the Move tool, rotate it, change its color, and so on.
Note
If you try to paste text into Elements by copying it from your word processor, the results can be unpredictable. Sometimes it works fine, but you may find the text comes in as one endlessly long line of words. If that happens, it’s often easier to type your text into Elements from scratch than to reformat it.
In Elements, you can change text after you enter it, just like in a word processor. Elements lets you change not only the letters, but the font and size, too, even if you’ve applied lots of Layer styles. You modify text by highlighting it and making the correction or by changing your settings in the Options bar. Figure 14-4 shows you the easy way to highlight text for editing.
Figure 14-4. If you change your mind about what you want to say, no problem. Here, the text is highlighted so that the words can be edited. The best part is that you can change the text to say anything, and all the formatting stays exactly the same. (You can’t do this after you simplify a Text layer, though.) If you find it hard to highlight text by dragging, go to the Layers panel and double-click the layer’s text icon (the white rectangle with the T in it). When you do, Elements highlights all the text on that layer so you can make your changes.
Tip
As mentioned earlier, you can see the word “Sample” in the Font Family menu (Text Options) displayed in the actual fonts themselves. Even better, Elements gives you a quick way to preview what your actual text will look like in various fonts. First, highlight the text, and then click in the Options bar’s Font box. Then use the up and down or left and right arrow keys to move around in the font list. Elements changes the words in your image so they appear in each font you choose as you go through the list.
You can make all these changes as long as you don’t simplify your text. Simplifying is the process of changing text from a vector shape that’s easy to edit to a rasterized graphic (see the box on Rasterizing Vector Shapes for details). In this respect, text works just like the shapes you learned about in Chapter 12: Once you simplify text, Elements doesn’t see it as text anymore, just as a bunch of regular pixels.
You can either simplify text yourself (by selecting Layer→Simplify Layer), or wait for Elements to prompt you to simplify, which it’ll do when you try to do things to the text like apply a filter or add an effect. It’s usually best not to simplify until you must.
Tip
While the text effects that come with Elements don’t simplify text, if you download effects, they may automatically simplify text without asking first. So make sure you’ve made all the edits you want to your text before using any effects you’ve downloaded.
You read about anti-aliasing for graphics in Chapter 5 (The Magic Wand). Anti-aliasing has a similar effect on text: It gets rid of any jaggedness by blending the edge pixels on letters to make the outline look smooth, as shown in Figure 14-5.
Figure 14-5. An extremely close look at two versions of the same A. The left one has antialiasing turned on, making its edges smooth (well, smoother). The edges on the right one are much more jagged and rough looking.
Elements always starts you off with anti-aliasing turned on, and 99 percent of the time you’ll want to keep it on. The main reason to turn it off is to avoid fringing—a line of unwanted pixels that make text look like it was cut out of an image with a colored background.
Tip
If your text looks really jagged even with anti-aliasing turned on, check your resolution: Text often looks poor at low resolution settings, just as photos do. See Changing the Size of an Image for more about resolution.
You turn anti-aliasing on and off by clicking the Options bar’s Anti-aliased button (the two As). The button has a dark outline when anti-aliasing is on. You can also apply this setting by going to Layer→Type→Anti-Alias Off or Anti-Alias On.