Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 13. Type in Elements

If you want to add text to your photos, Elements makes it easy. You can quickly create all kinds of fancy text to use on 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, or you can warp your type 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 button clicks (see Figure 13-1). By the time you finish this chapter, you'll have learned about all the ways that Elements can add pizzazz to your text.

Adding Type to an Image

It's a cinch to add text to an image in Elements. Just select the Type tool, choose your font, and type away. The Type tool has a Toolbox icon that's easy to recognize: a capital T. Elements actually gives you four different type tools, all of which are hidden behind the Toolbox icon's pop-out menu: the Horizontal Type tool, the Vertical Type tool, the Horizontal Type Mask, and the Vertical Type Mask.

You'll learn about the Type Mask tools later in this chapter (see Section 13.4). To get started, you'll focus on the regular Horizontal and Vertical Type tools. As their names imply, the Horizontal Type tool lets you enter type that runs left to right, while the Vertical Type tool is for creating type that runs down the page instead of across it.

When you use the Type tools, Elements automatically ...