Inside Photoshop® CS

Trick 2: Creating an Image Out of Text

I'm sure you've seen this effect before: a black-and-white high-contrast image is made up of text or symbols. A couple of hard-to-find plug-ins can do this (I believe that Alien Skin Software has one), but wouldn't it be cool to be able to create the effect yourself?

Materials needed (and provided on the companion CD) are a black-and-white photo and a text file. On the companion CD, we included a copy of the Gettysburg Address and a public domain picture of Abraham Lincoln. If you want to use your own photo, you should know that the Lincoln picture has been filtered, and you should filter your photo, too. I posterized the Lincoln picture to about six levels.

Ready to build a picture of Lincoln from the Gettysburg ...