Add text to images

Dancer Lori Barber (right) and musician Greg Fiellin (left) pair up for "Harlem Nocturne" during a performance of "Swing" at Bass Hall in Fort Worth on Tuesday, June 10, 2003.

Mark M. Hancock / © The Dallas Morning News



When I was preparing my entries for the Katies, so were some other staffers. The instructions were a little vague, so we decided to include paper proofs of our images and cutlines with the CDs.

I'll explain the process for anyone else who wants to know. It's important to remember the cutline becomes part of the image (a jpg, tiff, eps, etc.). It isn't a text block as Quark XPress or the other layout programs would create.

A big advantage to embedding text as part of the image is increased copyright protection. If a copyright symbol (©), name and date are part of an image, someone else can't claim ignorance in a courtroom. The infringer would have deliberately misused the image and can be slammed for heavy damages.

Here's how to do it:

• Open the image in Adobe Photoshop.


• Prepare the image as needed.


• The image should be in the correct orientation (horizontals are, verts are).


• Using the drop-down menus, go to Image, then Canvas Size. A dialog box appears.


• Increase the Height by 4 to 6 inches. This adds to both the top and bottom of the image.


• Using the Crop tool, remove any undesired section (top or bottom) by excluding it from the crop area (crop includes the image and the main text area). Crop.


• Select the Text tool from the tool box (it's the big "T"). Mouse the tool over the text area and click. On older versions, a dialog box appears. On newer versions, the text can be typed directly into the area.


• Set text font, size and color.


• Type desired text. Use Return to break lines because it's not text, it's raster characters, which look like text. Close the dialog box, or choose the Lasso tool and make a circle to set the text.


• Crop off the remainder of the unused cutline area.

If you need a print, Size the image (Image, drop down to Image Size) to fit the paper size. If the image is horizontal and you want to see it as a landscape print, rotate the entire image and size to fit the paper.
Print.

Enough for now,