ESSENTIAL TRICKS
P
hotoshop Elements’ Type tool enables you to
enrich your creative projects in a variety of ways,
such as providing your posters or book covers
with eye-catching typography. In the following
walkthrough we’ll show you how to put the Type tool
through its paces by personalising a picture with seaside
postcard-style text that can be emailed to your family.
You’ll find the Type tool in the Toolbox. It works in a
similar way to those in word-processing programs such as
TextEdit. When you move the mouse onto a Photoshop
Elements document you’ll see a text cursor. Click to place
the cursor in a particular place and start typing. A new text
layer will appear in the Layers panel. You can then use the
Move tool to fine-tune the position in the design.
The Type tool creates vector-based shapes. Vector
shapes use mathematics to describe their shape and size,
so you can enlarge the text without it becoming fuzzy
around the edges. You can also use the Create warped text
command in the Tool Options to make words bend and
curve, as you’ll see in our walkthrough. And because the
text is vector-based, you can still edit it after it’s been
warped (which is handy if you spot a spelling mistake.)
After modifying the text you can make it stand out from
the scene using Layer Styles. These cool features enable
you to add 3D effects to your text, such as drop shadows
and bevelled edges. We’ll use the Horizontal Type tool
in this walkthrough, but feel free to experiment with
other variants such as the Vertical Type tool. You can also
create text-shaped selection marquees too, courtesy of
the Type Mask Tool.Add text to
your photos
Turn photographs into
personalised postcards by
adding and modifying text
BEFORE
GET THE START FILES HERE: http://bit.ly/type-files