Photoshop Elements 9: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Text in Elements

If you want to add text to your images, Elements makes it easy. 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 know all the ways that Elements can add pizazz to your text.

Adding Text to an Image

It’s a cinch to add text to an image in Elements. Just select the Type tool, choose a font from the Options bar, and type away. The Type tool’s icon in the Tools panel is easy to recognize: It’s a capital T. (It lives just above the Crop tool or to the left of the Crop tool, depending on whether you have one or two columns of tools.) Elements actually gives you four different Type tools, all of which you can see in the Type tool icon’s pop-out menu: the Horizontal Type tool, the Vertical Type tool, the Horizontal Type Mask tool, and the Vertical Type Mask tool.

You’ll learn about the Type Mask tools later in this chapter (see Type Masks: Setting an Image in Text), but first you’ll focus on the regular Horizontal and Vertical Type tools. As their names imply, the Horizontal Type tool lets you enter text that runs left to ...