Placing fonts in PTE 5

[bharkins]

How does one place individual letters into the O/A screen? Presumably this must be done in Photoshop at present as adding text within the O/A screen is not available. I can easily put letters into any image in Photoshop. However, if I do a new file, and show it as transparent, then bring it up in O/A as an added image, it appears in O/A with the full screen size with a white background, not transparent. Help!

Bill

[alrobin]

Bill,

Save it as a ".png" file. And you will probably have to resize it in O/A.

[bharkins]

Thanks alot Al for your past two responses. I will work on both. What a wonderful resource is the Forum particularly with 5.0. I can hardly keep up with the Forum traffic since Igor set the AV world on fire!

Bill

[Lin Evans]

How does one place individual letters into the O/A screen? Presumably this must be done in Photoshop at present as adding text within the O/A screen is not available. I can easily put letters into any image in Photoshop. However, if I do a new file, and show it as transparent, then bring it up in O/A as an added image, it appears in O/A with the full screen size with a white background, not transparent. Help!

Bill

Let me expand a little on Al's suggestion. In case you haven't done this before, here's how you proceed. Open a new file in PhotoShop and be sure you have it set for Transparency rather than "white" or "background color". You should see a checkerboard pattern if the file is set to transparency.

Choose the "text" tool and set your opacity to 100%, choose your font size and color then type in your letter, word or sentence, etc. If you wish to apply special effects to the text such as drop shadows, etc., highlight the text then bring up your "Layers" box and click on the small round icon (add a layer style) located at the bottom left of the group of icons. You can experiment and see the effects you can create with the text. Once you have it looking like you want then crop excess "checkerboard" away and save it as a PNG file.

This file then can be used as an "object" and can be manipulated just as any other "image" with all effects possible with the graphical engine.

Lin

[thedom]

Lin,

You seem to have a good knowledge with Photoshop. I only have very basics skills.

Could you - or anyone who knows - explain how I can make :

- a text mask (i.e, black color for the background and transparent for the text)

- masks with progressive opacity (transparent to black) applied to the borders of various shape (circle, triangle, oval, text... or even more complex shape).

Thanks.

[ronwil]

Adding to what Lin has said I often use yellow as the basic colour for my text, before blending options, which doesn't show up well on the chequered transparent background. So I create a duplicate layer of the background anf fill it with a solid colour. I then add my text and use the blending options to my taste. When this is finished all you have to do is to deselect the duplicate solid colour layer and you have your text on a transparent background for saving as a *.png file.

As regards the question by "thedom" about transparent text on a black background or text mask. You could create the text as above, using a solid font, then using the magic wand tool select the text. Rasterise all layers - Layer>Rasterise>All layers. Now use the eraser tool over the text and you have the text selected in outline. Deselect the duplicate solid colou layer and you have the text selected in outline on a transparent background. Inverse selection - Select>Inverse and fill the background with the colour of your choice, not forgetting the islands in the centre of a's, o's, p's etc.

Hope that helps.

Ron [uK]

[ronwil]

thedom

Your request about transparent text on a black background or text mask. I spent some time in Photoshop working out how to do this and report to you in the last post. Did you try it and was that what you wanted?

Ron [uK]

[thedom]

Did you try it and was that what you wanted?

Hi Ron,

Thanks for your answer and for your time.

I didn't have time myself to try it yet but I definitely will in a couple of days and may be, if successfull, post a new little demo...

[bharkins]

Thanks Lin for your comment re: the text. The Photoshop part is no problem, the key is saving as a .PNG, not jpg.

Bill