Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac: 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 on greeting cards, as newsletter headlines, or as graphics for web pages. The program 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 how to add pizzazz 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 Toolbox icon is 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 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). 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 text that runs left to right, while the Vertical Type tool is for creating text that runs down the page.

When you use the Type tools, Elements automatically puts your text on its own layer, ...