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Match Type for Image

I could use my move tool, then, over here, to move this around the balloon. And I want it to be quite a bit larger. So we have two choices. I can press T to get my type tool back, I could click to insert my cursor, press Command or Control + A to highlight everything, and then I could come down here and drag the size up. Or I could just press Command or Control + T to bring up free transform, and then I could drag from the corner. If I hold down Alt or Option while I drag from the corner, I can pull from both sides at once, and that just saves me the hassle of having to reposition it. So I'll go ahead and scale that up and then click Commit. I'm gonna change the typeface while I'm thinking on it, and I think we're actually going to be using American Typewriter for the font. So I don't have to highlight it, 'cause I wanna affect the whole layer, so I'll just come down into my options bar and start typing American Typewriter, and then it will pull up all of the different versions that I ...

have, and I can scroll through these. And I'm not gonna go with bold. I'll just go with regular. And that's pretty simple. Something that makes type especially great to work with is that it is not made out of pixels the way our photos are. So this photo of this chair and this balloon and everything, that's all, of course, made of pixels, so we have to be careful with pixels. Pixels are precious and pixels can be fragile sometimes, and we have to be mindful of how we're dealing with the resolution of and size of our images and everything. So when it comes to type, we can do pretty much anything we want because the type is not made of pixels. It's actually what we would call vector information. So that means that we can scale it and then we could shrink it down and then we could change our minds and scale it up again, and we don't have to worry about resolution, which is great. So we can go ahead and make all kinds of changes to this, including something we haven't seen yet, which is we can warp this. So if I'm looking at this type and I think, you know, that's fun. I put it on the balloon and everything. But if I wanted it to really look like it was on the balloon, it should be a little bit distorted because the balloon is a round shape, and if the type was printed on the balloon it would also be stretched the way that the balloon is. So we're going to warp. So I wanna make sure I have my type tool active for that, and then I can come down here into the Options bar, and we have two more little Ts here. This one will toggle the orientation of that horizontal type to vertical type. Wow, that's super hard to read vertically. Look at that. This will bring up the warp controls. So I'm gonna click the warp button, and now we see that we can choose several different styles. Currently it's set to None, so when you first click on it, nothing's gonna happen. It's kind of anti-climactic. But we can click that drop-down, and you'll notice there's tons of different options for this. We have arcs and arches and all kinds of bulges. We can bulge the type. We also have an option to inflate the type. And I don't know, I guess it's kinda... Which way would we think looks... I think inflate's gonna look best for this particular effect. But I think maybe that's a little too much. So we can come in here and adjust this bend by just dragging the slider. So a bend setting of zero is basically not gonna make a difference. That's sort of like no effect. If we drag this to the right, it will inflate more and more, and if we drag to the left, it's almost like deflating. It's going the other direction. So I'm looking at this, and I think... I don't wanna go too far. I think it's easy to go too far in Photoshop. So I'm just gonna go a little, like, maybe 25 to 30%, maybe? If you wanted to, you could also experiment with the horizontal distortion. In this case, because it's on a round balloon, I don't think any of this, the horizontal or the vertical distortion's really going to apply very much. So I think we're fine just leaving that as it is. I'm gonna go ahead and click OK, and that's it. We've warped the type and put it on a balloon, and I think it looks pretty great. One thing that we could do if we wanted to take this a little further and make it maybe even a little more realistic is that this type is really crisp because we just created it on the computer. It's basically, like, perfect, and that is great. However, it's gonna be way too sharp if we zoom in. I think it's too sharp for the image. It looks like we added it in the computer in Photoshop. So what I wanna do is blur this just a smidge, just to match the organicness of the pixels that we're putting this into. So we have a filter for that. We can come up to the filter menu and choose Blur, Gaussian Blur. If you're ever looking for just a generic blur, Gaussian Blur is the one to go for. A little trivia fact for you. It got its name from the mathematician, I guess, who created the formula that's used to process the blur. These are the weird things you learn (laughs) when you spend a lot of time in Photoshop. But I always think of that and I think it's interesting. So now you know. If you're ever on Jeopardy, you're welcome. When we click on that, we're gonna get this layer, or this message that pops up, and it's saying, hey, this type layer must be rasterized or converted to a smart object before we can proceed. If it's rasterized, the text will no longer be editable. Okay, so what does that mean? Rasterized means convert to pixels. That's what that is. That's all that is. So it would take away the vector nature of the type and it would turn it into pixels. Then we can't edit it anymore. I'll show you what that looks like. So let's just say we click rasterize. Okay. The reason we're being required to do this is that that blur function, it works on pixels. It's hard to blur a mathematically defined shape. So that's a pixel function. So in order to make this work, Photoshop needs pixels, and of course as a vector, it doesn't, there are no pixels in a type layer. So we had to convert it. We rasterized it. Now we're in the blur window, and we can determine how much blur. And it's just trial and error. That's too much. Obviously if we went way over here, we lose the letters entirely. So we'd wanna keep this low, like really just, like, two pixels I think would be plenty. And then we would click OK. And you'll notice in the layers panel that there's no longer a big T here, and that's because it's no longer a type layer. Yes, it resembles type. We can still read it. It's still letters. But it's not a type layer. Now it's just pixels laying around in the shape of letters. So that means I can do things like get the eraser tool and just erase it. I mean, it's not text anymore. It's just pixels. And that can be useful for certain effects or certain things, like in this case blurring, but it does mean that I cannot edit it anymore. So if I wanted to change the font or I wanted to change the size or the color or put a different word on here, I'd have to start over, because there's no type here for me to select and to edit. So we're gonna undo that, so we're back to our actual type layer that we can edit, and let's try this again. Let's come up to the Filter menu, and again go to Blur, Gaussian Blur, and this time when this message pops up, we have this option here, Convert To Smart Object. That means that Photoshop is basically going to go ahead and rasterize it anyway so it can be blurred, but it is going to keep, in its memory, the actual vector file, so you can still edit it. So we'll go ahead and click Convert To Smart Object. And we get the same window, the same pixels. We can blur everything just the same way. So we'll go ahead and click OK. And we get the same end result, and we get this layer that no longer has a big T on it, but you'll notice it has this little icon on the thumbnail here. This lets us know that it's a smart object. So we can still edit this by double clicking... Or not. I wanna say this might be a limitation of Elements which I just walked into. 'Cause I was thinking to myself, I don't think Elements lets you work with smart objects, and then it offered me the chance to make this a smart object, which is kind of a new thing, but now it's not letting me edit it. So that might also be a limitation that we have to accept and acknowledge, which means I'm gonna show you a workaround for how you can still blur your text but also maintain editability. So here's how we do that. I'm gonna undo this rasterization, and what I wanna do then beforehand is press Command or Control + J to duplicate the type layer. So I'm gonna keep one layer that's a type layer and one layer that we're gonna rasterize. And I'm gonna hide this bottom layer here. So we'll keep this one as a type layer and I'm gonna hide it. This layer we'll go ahead and rasterize, and we can do that by following the blur that we've done, or if you just need to rasterize a layer for any reason at any time, you can just right-click... There we go. You can just right-click and say Simplify Layer. It's another word for rasterize. So sometimes, in this place, Elements calls it simplify. When you try to run the blur filter, it gives you the warning that refers to it as rasterize, but it's the same thing. So we'll click Simplify Layer, and now it's been converted to pixels, and we can come up to the Filter menu and choose Blur, Gaussian Blur, and we don't have that warning message that pops up anymore because we've already converted it to pixels. Then we could click OK. Now we have sort of the best of both worlds. If we had been able to edit that smart object, this would accomplish the same thing. So this layer is the pixel layer of the type that we blurred, and then down below we have the original type layer. So if I decide I need to resize this or change the type or make any changes to the actual text, I could just throw this layer in the trash and then turn this layer back on, get in here and make any changes that I want, and then I would just again duplicate it and re-blur it. So those are some ways that we can work around some of the limitations that you might run into. But I think overall that creates a really nice effect, and the warp tool, I think, is especially fun. You can really experiment with that. It's great for hand-lettering, too. If you're placing type and you want it to be a little more organic and not have such a perfectly straight line, the warp tool is a great way to do that.