Digital Focus: Special Effects With Text and Photos

Feature: Painting With Text

If you're reading this newsletter, you know that you are smarter, better looking, and more discriminating than your neighbor. You possess secret knowledge: You know that you can use digital photos to create designs for all sorts of interesting projects, like T-shirts, posters, greeting cards, and even coffee mugs. Check out "Digital Focus: Photo Printer Secrets for the Holidays" if you need to refresh your memory.

What you may not know is that you can use text to make all of those projects even better. I'm not talking about stamping a boring message in 24-point Arial on top of your picture. I'm talking about using the advanced tools in an image editor to decorate your creation as if the text were a sophisticated paintbrush all by itself.

Fill Text With an Image

There are all sorts of clever tricks you can do with text, but my personal favorite is filling chunky characters with a picture. The result looks like you laid a stencil over a photograph--the picture shows through the hollow letters. Imagine, for instance, a large white poster with the word "Colorado" inscribed on it with snow-capped mountains peeking through the letters. Or click here for something I came up with.

Getting this effect is a snap in Paint Shop Pro. Fire up Paint Shop Pro, then open the picture that you want to show through the text. Click on the Text icon (it looks like a capital "A") and click in the spot where you want to grab the photo. This opens the Text Entry dialog box. Type in your text and choose a font and size. You'll want to pick a fairly thick, chunky font for this to really have the desired effect. A fat stencil-style font is ideal. If your font is too small or too thin, you won't see much of the picture.

Finally, make sure that the text mode is set to "selection" at the bottom of the Text Entry dialog box. Click OK, and you should see your text appear as a selection of the background image, not as solid characters. If it doesn't appear exactly where you want it in the image, just click on the image to move the text and open the Text Entry dialog box again (which lets you adjust the text size as well). Tip: When you click, you're positioning the lower left corner of the text.

You can now copy the selection into another image: Choose File, Open and locate the image file that you want to paste this text into. Then click Edit, Paste, As Transparent Selection. The on-screen pointer will turn into the text you want to paste. Move it to the desired location and click to drop it. Of course, you can also paste the text into another part of the original image.

Add a Drop Shadow

If you liked that effect, I think you'll like this one even better. By adding a bit of drop shadow to some "picture text," you can add a cleverly stylized headline or caption to a photograph.

Begin by setting the background color to pure black. In Paint Shop Pro, you can do this by right-clicking in the black region of the rainbow-hued color palette that lives on the right side of the screen. Then create some new text in exactly the same way we did in the previous section.

When you click OK and see the text selection appear on your image, position the mouse pointer inside the text (the pointer will change into a four-way arrow) and then click and drag it a bit to the upper left. The background color will appear in the space you left behind. By positioning the text carefully, you can create a cool drop-shadow to draw attention to the text, which is actually made of the background image.

As the Rolling Stone editor in the movie Almost Famous would say, "Crazy!"