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Underground > Creation >

Overlaying Text on images

All Acting Regiment

15:43 / 22.01.08

There's a good way and a bad way of doing most things, and right now I'm interested in good ways of throwing together texts and images. Can it be done so as to still be able to 'read' both? What computer programs are good for it? What kind of fonts work best? Who has already done good work in this field?

Char Aina

15:46 / 22.01.08

Most image software has a text tool. Pasting the image in is prolly the easiest way to get it on to the canvas. You can then select the text tool and type away. Most programs will also allow access to your font file, the same one you use in word.

Do you have MSPaint? Most PC users do.

Char Aina

15:50 / 22.01.08

Personally I use Fireworks or PhotoshopCS, but if you can't get a copy of either of those, I hear good things about gimp.

Haven't tried it, but I imagine it'll have what you need.

All Acting Regiment

17:10 / 22.01.08

Cheers. I've been fiddling with PSP but will have a look at GIMP.

electric monk

18:00 / 22.01.08

Is there a certain look you're trying to achieve, AAR? Like, something you've seen in a magazine or ad?

unbecoming

10:52 / 23.01.08

personally i like scribus. Open source and plenty of tutorials online to learn from. It's a layout editor so it works on the combination of text and image boxes.

it has, IMO an advantage over GIMP or Photoshop for combining text and image because that is the specific task that it has been designed for, whereas the aforementioned image editors have text as an afterthought and enlargement can often lead to dodgy looking text.

the best approach is to use GIMP to do your images and then import them into scribus with your text and then play about with the set up from there.

jostarla

00:41 / 05.02.08

Did anyone see that CD cover thing (and I say 'thing' because I'm loath to call it a 'meme') floating around a few weeks ago? It involved pulling a random photo from the Most Interesting pool on Flickr as the cover image, the final words of a random quote from another site as the album title and a random Wikipedia article title as the band name and then photoshopping them all together.

There were some fantastic examples of text overlayed on photographs that you could use as inspiration. The Flickr group with the results is here .

Olulabelle

19:36 / 06.02.08

AAR, It depends what you want to use the image and text for.

I agree about photoshop being not so great for text. I personally use photoshop to make up my image and then place that in illustrator and overlay the text there. That's for stuff for print. Stuff for the web it doesn't matter so much, because you don't need such hi-res.

Jostarla, that's a lovely reference, especially for someone interested in styles of text and things like AAR is saying. Really useful.

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