Photoshop Elements 10: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Text in Elements

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).

Adding Text to an Image

It’s a cinch to add text to an image in Elements. Just activate the ...