MacMost Now 828: Adding Text To Images With Pixelmator

You can use Pixelmator to add text directly to an image. You can use different fonts, sizes and styles. You can also rotate the text and add a drop shadow. Pixelmator special effects can be applied to text once the text has been converted to a bitmap layer.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's look at adding text to images using Pixelmator.
So anyone surfing the internet in the last ten years knows that it is a common thing to take a funny picture and add a text caption to it. So let's look at how you can do that using Pixelmator.
Here I've opened up a simple photo using Pixelmator. Now to add text to it there are several ways you can start. One is you can click on the text tool here under the Tools and click anywhere to add text. Likewise you could also just click this text button here at the top once you have selected Text here and it will just add a piece of text right in the middle. Either way you can click and drag this text around the screen and you can pull on the ends of it to expand it. So we want to have a caption here that basically spans the entire thing so let's expand it there and now we are ready to add text.
To type the text that we want double click inside of it and it will select text there and then just type. So the next thing we want to do is we want to change the font and the size. Let's double click in it and select everything. I will use Command A here; select it all. So now we can change the font and size. Let's make it a little larger first so we can see it better. Let's go up to 48 point here. Then let's go and find a more suitable font that will be a little more fun for this. So let's try something let say Marker. Then we can adjust the size a little more now that we know the font, maybe have it go on several lines if we make the font large enough. At any time we can switch to the selection tool here and drag it around. Then go back to the Text tool to go back and edit the text again. This text font here has two versions so I will go with one like that. Then I click here to change the color so it is something that contrasts more with the floor underneath it. Maybe a little darker like that.
Now there is a lot more that we can do. You notice here there is a dot-dot-dot saying there is more tools here so we're going to expand the window a bit so we can see all the tools. We can see now that we have the ability to Left Justify it or Center Justify it. Select it like that. We can also change the spacing between the lines if we wanted to. Make it a little tighter. We can change the spacing between the characters as well.
Now if we want finer control one of the things that we can do is to bring up the Text Font Inspector. Command T will do that. This brings up the system Fonts panel here. I can access the fonts and I can also adjust the size on a point-by-point basis like that a little bit better. I can add things like a drop shadow as well. Like that. Then once you have a drop shadow you can adjust the darkness of the shadow and the blurriness of the shadow and the distance and even the angle of the shadow if I want. The shadow does help it pop out the text a little bit more.
Now we can continue to transform the text a little bit here. If I select it I can control click on it and get some more options. You can see here there are other ways to get to this. I can Transform and it will change everything up here so I can do it with height scaling. I can also rotate it. I can make it with an angle here.
So what else can we do with it? Well, this text is actually a layer over the regular image. Let's go to View and Show Layers. We can see we have two layers. We have the background image and the text image. One thing that we can do with it right here is  under Layers we can change how opaque that layer is if we wanted to. We can also change the blending so we can change maybe how the colors look over on that layer. So there is some basic things we can do there.
But in addition we can also Control/Click on it and Convert it to Pixels. Once it is converted to pixels it is no longer editable text. But as pixels we can now apply different effects to it. So let's go View/Show Effects and we can see we have a lot of different effects here. So for instance we want to do the crystalize effect. We could double click and we see that it crystalizes the text. Not the photo behind it but just the text. Now that's unreadable so we will undo some of the crystallization to make it more interesting; like that. Some of the effects will be useful for text and some will not be. Now Pointilize creates an interesting kind of look there. That may or may not work depending upon your use. 
Some of the Distortion effects work pretty well. For instance let's just use a linear bump here and put the bump by the text and you can take and use that to kind of distort the text there. Make it look a little more interesting. Then I can move this entire layer here to  readjust it.
Then of course when you are done you can export it as a smaller jpeg that you can upload to your Facebook wall or wherever you want. So there are a lot of different techniques and ways you can put text there but they are some of the basics.
Hope you found this useful. Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 6 Responses to “MacMost Now 828: Adding Text To Images With Pixelmator”

Mark

12 years ago

Thanks, Gary. Love the Pixelmater lessons! Hope you do more.

Debbie Gerlach

I can't find the application pixelmator on my computer. I have Mountain Lion. how do i get pixelmator?

Gary Rosenzweig

You purchase it in the Mac App Store.

david fisher

another good one Gary, thanks a lot.

Great Tutorial Gary, Thanks man, I would like to learn more about Pixelmator

Johnny Robish

Wonderful lesson as usual Gary. I wasn't even aware of Pixelmator and can really use something like that for my humor website. Your tips are always so valuable.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 828: Adding Text To Images With Pixelmator

Comments: 6 Responses to “MacMost Now 828: Adding Text To Images With Pixelmator”

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