Text Boxes Don’t Have to be Boxes!

I’m so glad to have a distraction from the train wreck on my TV right now. All that hot air is giving me a headache. Then there’s the odd thing my Photoshop Elements did. It reset all my preferences all by itself. How does that happen?? I think I’ve got everything back to normal now.

When I got a message from Lisa about putting text inside a shape other than a box, I had to look at all the other tutorials I’d written to be sure I hadn’t already plowed that field. I found a tut about putting text around a shape, but not one for filling a shape. I knew I could build a tutorial around it, but I wasn’t as successful as I’d thought I would be. Her enquiry was about creating a geometric shape that she could then quickly and easily fill with her journaling. Alas, I haven’t succeeded in making that work. But… I can still show you how to use the Custom Shapes tool to create unique text boxes for your layouts. I’ll plop a paper down on my canvas so you can see what I’m doing more clearly. I chose this beautiful blue paper from ADB Designs‘ Antiques Emporium.

Next I had to choose a shape. The software has a huge assortment of shapes to choose from, but there are a few things to keep in mind when you’re choosing. If you want to use a fancy font, you might want to keep the shape simple. If you want to use a large font, again, keep the shape simple. But remember that you have the opportunity to make your finished text larger and more legible later on in the process. So by implication, the more complex the shape, the smaller and tighter the font will need to be. The default shapes are pretty ordinary, so if you want to see all the possibilities, click on that little upside-down pyramid icon to the right of the image box and from the pull-down menu, choose All Elements Shapes. Just for fun I chose this pear shape for my initial example, clicking and dragging out the shape by moving my cursor over the canvas. You can direct the orientation of the shape while you’re creating it simply by moving the cursor in the direction you want to adjust. You can use whatever colour you want for this step, just pick something that will show up against your background.

Now on to the text part. Select the Text tool. I’m just going to use the default font, Myriad Pro Regular for my example, and the Horizontal Text tool, but you do you. Choose your font, but before you go any further, check the Size and Leading (space between lines), make sure you’ve got a contrasting colour in the foreground box so you can see your text, and that your text will be centered. You’ll note that the layer with the shape on it is a Smart Object. Whatever you do now won’t change that layer unless you Simplify it. DON’T!

Move the cursor inside your shape, anywhere inside the shape; it isn’t necessary to put the cursor where you want to start your text. When you move inside the boundaries of your shape, your I-beam icon that tells you you’ve got the Text tool active will look like the image – the I-beam will be inside a circle. That’s how you know Elements knows you’re going to text inside a shape, and it turns on the invisible force field that keeps your text inside the shape.

Then just type! The software will keep all the text inside the shape and shift things as needed. If you want to have a very narrow border around your text and a tight shape, you may need to adjust the size of your font, adjust the Tracking (kerning – space between individual letters and words, only available with versions 2019 and later) or to edit the words you use to fill the space better. (I’m free-associating in the text on these images. It might be better if you don’t try to read it!)

At this point, you know how to do this task! To see what your text will look like on your paper, turn the visibility for the shape layer off and all that you see is your journaling. I was a tiny bit disappointed that no text went into the stem, but if I’d used an almost invisibly small font, I might have gotten that to work.

The rest of the images are all just to help you figure out how to use the shapes. Lisa mentioned geometric shapes specifically so I chose the Polygon Shape tool. You might think you’re limited in what shapes you can create here, but you can change the number of sides on your shape and keep them crisp or Soften them. There’s also the option to add Styles to your shape but we’re looking at text, so we won’t go there. Odd numbers are always more interesting than even numbers so I chose 9 sides.

As I mentioned, the simpler the shape, the larger the font can be. And too, it’s possible to adjust the orientation of your shape as you’re dragging it out.

The purpose of this image is just to show you that turning Visibility off for the Shape layer while the TEXT layer is the active layer will leave an outline on your paper. If you’re okay with that you can later exploit having the outline there. If you’re not okay with it, make the Shape layer active and it goes away.

Maybe I’d want to leave the outline there… this looks like I typed inside a circle!

And then there’s the Smooth cornered nonagon… almost indistinguishable from a circle. If I wanted a circle I could have chosen a circle!

Smooth pentagon…

How about stars? I’m quite partial to stars. Even this Star Shape tool has options. This is a basic 5 pointed star with a 50% Indent. I’ll show you some different Indents coming up.

Stars are more complex shapes, so the font size will need to be on the smaller side so the text fills the points better. Again, if it’s not looking right to you, try editing the words you’ve used, or adjusting the font size. If you’re adventurous and have 2019 or newer you can try tinkering with the Tracking so there’s more or less space between the letters or words.

With the Shape layer concealed, the star shape seems well-enough defined. If I’d started the text with a single or two-letter word, it would have started closer to the top of the upper point. You might also note that at the very end, there are random loose letters.

Just by Smoothing the Indents on the same star settings I ended up with this shape. It’s different, and could be an interesting addition to a layout.

Here’s what that same basic 5 pointed star looks like with both the Indents and the Points Smoothed. Not my jam.

So what happens if you change the amount of Indent? You get something like this! I went from 50% to 90%. Those points could draw blood! See how the letter “I” is all the way up into that top point? This could take a lot of tinkering.

If I turn off the Shape layer, I’m left with this. It’s just okay.

Then I thought, what will happen with a shape like this sign? Will the text jump over the “cut-out” area or not? Not. So disappointed!

What I learned from playing with this tulip shape is that it too will need some massaging to get it to work well. It ended up not being that bad…

I dropped the font size down to 12 points and was able to completely fill the shape. Now, 12 point type isn’t easy to read on a 600×600 pixel image, but it might be okay if you print out at 12×12 inches. The other option would be to fill the shape and then make the text layer larger.

Can I just leave the Shape layer in there as a journaling blank? Of course! And I can also make it look more intentional too. To make any adjustments to the shape though, other than to resize, it’ll need to be Simplified. (Right-click on the layer then choose Simplify Layer.)

Once the layer is dumbed down, I can add a Stroke to the edge in the same colour to make the shape larger without altering the way the text fits into it. To keep those points as sharp as possible I’ll put the stroke on the centre of the edge rather than outside. The stroke can be as wide as you want, but as you go bigger, the corners will blunt a bit. This tulip doesn’t really have sharp points so it’s all good! Edit>Stroke (Outline) Selection.

If you think you might want to put a coloured border around your text box, rather than just add a Stroke to the layer, Select the edges by CTRL/CMD>clicking on the shape’s layer thumbnail. Once you have the marching ants around your shape you can add the Stroke that makes the shape bigger, then come in again and add a narrower, coloured Stroke to make your border without having to reSelect the edge. For the coloured border, you can go inside the selection and not worry about it biting into your text, as long as it’s skinny.

If you’ve put your coloured Stroke on its own layer (and I always recommend that!) you can get rid of the shape layer and still have a nice border!

Lisa, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to find a way to do this with a hand-drawn geometric shape but I think I’ve shown you some options to get closer to the look you’re after.

Hopefully next week it won’t be so blisteringly cold outside and we can all get some fresh air! See you then.

Here is a link to a PDF version of this tutorial: https://bit.ly/3aWs4yN

Write Your Troubles in Sand

It looks like manipulating fonts is the theme for January! I love it when readers bring their ideas to me and challenge me to find a way to put them into practice. After the Ninja post, Sherry Pennington dropped this into the comments: “While we are on the topic of fonts, you wouldn’t happen to have one for Snow Writing or Sand Writing ?? I can find tuts and actions for Photoshop but nothing for PSE.” So I set about looking into that and ran with it! I found a video tutorial based on PSE, posted by the brilliant George Peirson of How-To Gurus that looked pretty easy, but I was disappointed that it didn’t look totally real. The following is built on his work, with my own finishing touches. [Spoiler alert: there are a LOT of screenshots, but some of them are for review.] First though, I had to find a suitable photo of sand.

Then I had to choose a font. I want to always offer options here that aren’t going to cost you any money, so with that in mind, I opted to use KG Drops of Jupiter, which is available free at dafont.com. While writing in the sand can be accomplished with a variety of found objects like sticks, shells and so on, I chose a font that looked like it could have been written with a finger, something all of us have.

We’ve made Copy layers in a lot of previous tutorials but I’ve never really shown this method of doing it. It’s great because it creates a layer with JUST THE SAND! And it eliminates a couple of steps, so that’s always going to be a winner for me. I clicked on the layer thumbnail of the text layer, got my ants marching around the edges, and then with a copy of the sand photo active, I clicked Layer>New>Layer Via Copy. (Actually, you know I used the shortcut CTRL/CMD>J. 😉 )

This was accomplished in just 2 steps! (I’ve turned the other layers’ visibility off so you can see just the text Copy layer.) Okay, that don’t impress me much.

To make it look like this text is actually depressed in the sand, we’ll need to add a Bevel. But this method I’m showing you is a bit different and much more useful for this specific technique. Instead of clicking on the Styles button at the lower right and choosing Bevels from the menu, I did this: Layer>Layer Style>Style Settings. I’d never done it this way before, but had to give it a try!

This menu opened up with nothing selected, but all the options right there.

When I clicked on Bevel, this adjustment panel opened. Notice the default settings are very different from the defaults you’d see if you went to Styles>Bevels route.

I wanted the centres of the letters to be quite round, since I’m “writing” with my finger. So I increased the Bevel to 12 pixels. I also reset the Lighting Angle to 120°, which is MY default setting. You’ll consider the angle of the light in the photos for your layout and the angle of the light for the drop shadows you’ll use when choosing these settings.

To carve the text into the sand the Bevel has to go down.

And after these few steps it looks like this.

I don’t always bother renaming the layers in the layers panel, but for this technique it makes a huge difference in the execution, because we’re going to do a bunch of copying and tweaking so knowing which layer is which will really be helpful. So I renamed this sand text layer SAND 1. Then I made a Copy (CTRL/CMD>J) and renamed it to SAND 2 before moving that SAND 2 layer below the first SAND layer. Refer to the screenshot if this is confusing.

This step seems silly, because it undoes what we just did to the SAND 1 layer, but on SAND 2 we’re going to flip the Bevel back to Up.

This image is purely for reference. It shows SAND 2 with its upward Bevel.

And this image has both SAND 1 and SAND 2 visible, but not obviously so.

With the sand photo layer visible the text looks like this. Ho hum.

As you know, when your write in wet sand, some of the sand gets pushed up into a ridge along the edges of each letter. To achieve this effect, I activated the Move tool and nudged SAND 2 over to the left and upward a little bit. Okay, that’s a little better.

Time for another Copy of the SAND 1 layer. You can Duplicate Layer or just CTRL/CMD>J it.

This new SAND 3 layer will have a Blend Mode change to Lighten.

The changes are subtle. And it’s still not blowing me away.

So we’re going to do something I’ve never shown you before. (Because I’ve never used it… but I’m going to now!) Let’s add a Levels Adjustment Layer! Click Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels…

Make sure you’re on SAND 3. Check the Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask. This is going to become the Shadow layer, so you can rename the layer to reflect that if it will help.

In the adjustment menu box with the image in it, drag the dark slider to the right to darken the shadowed areas just a bit. It doesn’t need much.

Now move down to SAND 2 and do the same thing. Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels…

Make sure you’re Creating a Clipping Mask.

Only this time we’re working on the highlights, so we’re going to pull the light slider to the left a bit.

This layer looks a little too sharp so we’ll add a Gaussian Blur to it. Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur

And it just need a teeny-weeny bit of blur, a Radius of about 2 pixels.

Were you thinking we were done with the Adjustment Layer masks? Nope… we’re going to add one to the SAND 1 layer now – which should be in the middle of the SAND stack – and tweak the Midtones.

Just to review…

By sliding the centre slider to the right a bit, it deepens the midtones and makes the letters look more realistic. Whenever you’re pulling sliders, always watch what’s happening to your image so you don’t go too far. However… you can definitely still go back and readjust each of these Adjustment Layer masks if needed.

This was where the tutorial from George ended. But to my eye, it still didn’t look real enough. When looking at images of actual writing in actual sand, they all had some crumbly grainy rims of raised sand, and this looked too perfect. What to do? I reactivated the original text layer from way back at the beginning.

Then I added a new blank layer ABOVE the text and set my foreground colour to something sandy-looking.

Every time I tried to show you how I chose my Brush, the selection box kept disappearing. So this is a photo from my phone. Assorted Brushes is a set that comes with the PSE software. I chose a texture brush from the set.

Then I got ahead of myself and missed a screenshot. I went into the Brush Settings and added a small Scatter, about 5%, so the edges would be more natural. Then I started brushing over the text in a random pattern, making it a bit heavier wherever a finger stroke would have started or ended. I think it looks suitably crumbly.

With only my brush layer visible I was able to see where it might need a bit more sand.

That looks more like it!

In this image the brush layer is still on the top. It’ll need to be moved down the stack so it sits underneath the SAND layers, but it looks pretty good.

Zooming out with the crumbly layer at the bottom lets me see the full effect. I think the raised edges are still too perfect.

So I brushed some sandy clumps onto the SAND 2 LAYER (not the Adjustment Layer). I think it looks pretty real now. Now, this is just the basic technique. The text can be skewed for photos where the sand isn’t perpendicular to the lens, but that’s a topic for another time.

This technique can be done with whites and grays too, so it looks like writing in the snow. (If you’re really cheeky, you could add some yellow in there too… ) Sherry, I hope this is what you were looking for. It seems like it’s labour-intensive, but it really isn’t too bad.

Next week we might be manipulating text again. I haven’t decided yet!
Here is a link to the PDF version of this tutorial: https://bit.ly/2KRnSr3

Another Take on Titles

I can’t be the only one who’s noticed the trend of templates featuring gigantic, block-letter titles with cardstock borders. And I KNOW I’m not the only one who’d like to use them but the titles offered aren’t working for me. So today I’m going to show you how to make your own jumbo titles that you can customize to your heart’s content. My inspiration was some photos of my granddaughter that were taken in August. She’s absolutely fearless and is already showing great promise as a gymnast, and I’m convinced she could be a worthy American Ninja Warrior even at her young age. I knew I wanted my layout to have a prominent title and that it should be feminine, because she’s wearing a dress in most of the photos… such a contradiction she is. The gigantic-block-letter-cardstock-bordered title appealed to me so I started by looking at my fonts for suitable candidates. There are lots of commercial fonts that are “layered”, meaning they have a a set of characters that provide a border that could work, but they tend to be fussy, and I wanted this to be accessible to everyone, so we’re not going to use one of those!

Actually, many of the system fonts that come standard on most computers will work beautifully for this technique; I’m pretty sure Impact is the basis for the commercially-available template versions. I decided to try two fonts and see which I liked better. I started with a commercial font called Liberation Sans Narrow Bold (yes… the name is that long!). It’s blocky but not harsh. And my second choice was Constantia Bold, a system-based serif font that I wasn’t sure would work, but worth a try. I went with BIG, 200 pixels for my text. And each letter is on its own layer.

Next, I created a New Layer above the first “N” and CTRL/CMD>clicked on the layer thumbnail for the “N” layer to select the outer edges. (Marching ants are not visible in this screenshot.) These steps will be followed for each letter in the title.

I added a white, 15 pixel Stroke to the outside of the selection. Edit>Stroke (Outline Selection) By putting the Stroke outside the selection, it keeps the sharp points and edges although some corners are slightly rounded. That won’t be visible in the end. You can make the Stroke wider, but be careful not to obliterate your areas that should have gaps. I’d suggest no wider than 25 pixels.

Each of the letters can now be used as a clipping mask. (That’s why I used gray as my foreground colour – to remind me to clip something to them.)

I added a white Stroke to every letter in the same manner. The white Stroke layers will become my “cardstock” border.

But first, to get the Stroke to that lofty goal, I need to make some adjustments. The Stroke by itself is a little anemic, so I’m going to give it a Bevel Style. I Selected all the Stroke layers by holding down the CTRL/CMD key and clicking on each of them, as you can see in the screenshot. Why? So I can apply the Bevel Style to all of the borders in a single step. Remember: Work Smart, Not Hard!

Adding a Bevel Style will accomplish a couple of things – it’ll give the border some substance and it’ll add a bit of shadowing to eliminate the need for doing that as a separate step. Click on the Styles button at the lower right of your workspace and select Bevels from the dropdown menu. Of course, I tried ALL the options for Beveling so I could say authoritatively that Simple Emboss is the right choice.

The default settings for this Style are 90° Lighting Angle, 21 pixel Size and Up for the Direction. I wasn’t blown away by the defaults so I started adjusting each of the Bevels with the letter “A”. Double-click on the fx symbol at the far right of the layer in the Layers panel to open up the adjustment menu. Then I made my changes. You may be able to see the difference between the “J” and the “A”. Once I was happy with the look, I right-clicked on the “A” layer and chose Copy Layer Style. Then I reselected the rest of the border layers and right-clicked again, this time selecting Paste Layer Style. WSNH again!

Then I went on to my second title, the one with the serifs. This time when I added the Bevel, I also added both an Inner and Outer Glow – all found in the adjustments for the Layer Style. I made it simple by setting everything to 10. In the image, I’ve adjusted the first “N” but that’s all.

When I was happy I chose some girly papers to clip to my letters from Ooh La La Scraps‘ Birthday Wishes Girl bundle. Need a refresher on clipping? Put your paper over top of the layer you’re using as your clipping mask. Then right-click on the paper layer and choose Create Clipping Mask or CTRL/CMD>G for PSE versions up to 14, CTRL/CMD>ALT>G for versions 15+. Cute, huh?

But which one will I use for my title?

Yes, I went with the second one with the serifs. If I want to manipulate the letters any further, I need to either Merge or Link the layers so that when I move one letter, all parts of it go with it. I Merged (CTRL/CMD>E), but if you prefer to have the layers separate but linked, go ahead and select all three of the layers for each letter then click on the little chunk of chain next to the eyeball icon.

I moved my letters around to make them a little less starchy. And it’s finished! I’m going to be looking for your layouts with jumbo titles now!

Here is a downloadable PDF: https://bit.ly/2LU4oT5