5. Text and Textures.

We did not include work on making masks in these sessions but we included two techniques for adding images and text to photomontages which could be seen as introducing the concept of masks.

In these session we introduced ways of adding text to images, how to create text with texture and one way of creating drop shadows.

A

1. Open a background image

2. Set the Colour Palette to default so that the two boxes have Black and White in respectively. Use the small arrows in the box to switch the colours to make White the foreground and Black the background colours.

3. Create a new page: Menu >File>New and set the size to Width 640 pixels Height 480 pixels.

4. Open the layers palette: Menu>Windows> Show Layers.

5. Experiment with the Text Tools to create letters and words on the image. Change the colour of the text. Change the font and the font size.

6. Notice that when you add text to the image, the text goes onto a new layer which you can view on the layers palette.
Click on a layer to make it active and move the text around on the page. Click and Drag a layer to the bin icon to delete it.

B

1. Repeat stages A 1 - 4

2. Use the Type Mask tool ( the T with dotted lines around it!) to put words onto a background image. Click on the letters with the move tool, hold the button down and drag the image to a different part of the page. Because you set the background to Black in stage A 2 the area of the image where the letters were should be black.

3. Use Menu> Copy >Paste to copy the words onto a new page.

4. Use the Magic Wand tool to pick up the black letters from the background image. (Shift Click allows you to add to a selection)

5. Copy and paste the black letters onto the new page.

6. Select the layer with the black letters and apply a Gaussian Blur Menu>Filter>Blur Gaussian Blur.

7. Change the position of the layer so that the black letters are under the coloured letters by clicking and dragging layer 2 onto layer 1 in the layers palette.

8. If you want to work on the image again with the layers, save the file as a .PSD file. Otherwise flatten the layers using Menu>Layers> Flatten.