Photoshop Elements 12: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Text in Elements

Elements makes it easy to add text to 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 also gives you lots of ways to jazz up 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 of Elements type tools let you change text with just a few clicks (see Figure 14-1).

And that’s not all. You also get three special tools for making artistic text: “Text on Selection,” “Text on Shape,” and “Text on Custom Path.” These tools let you create text that swoops and turns, or make text run around the edge of an object. You can create very dramatic text effects with these tools, which are covered beginning on Artistic Text. By the time you finish this chapter, you’ll know all the ways Elements can add pizzazz to text.

Adding Text to an Image

It’s a cinch to add text to an image in Elements. Just activate a type tool, choose a font in the Tool Options area, and then type away. The type tools’ icon in the Tools panel is easy to recognize: It’s a capital T. (It lives at the bottom left of the Draw section.) You can also activate it by pressing T.

Elements actually gives you seven different type tools, all of which you can see in the type tools’ Tool Options: the Horizontal Type tool, the Vertical Type tool, the Horizontal Type Mask ...