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Photoshop Elements: Fill Single Text Characters with Images

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Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 6

August 2, 2008

You can fill text with an image in two ways:

The process you use to fill the text varies for these two results. In this lesson, we will fill single characters in a word with different images.

Example Images Used for Fill
Example Images used in text fill

To fill single characters in a word with different images:

  1. Press D to set the foreground and background colors to the default colors of black foreground and white background.
  2. Open a new file and fill the background with white.
  3. From the toolbar, select the Horizontal Type tool and enter your text in black. Choose a font that has wide thick characters so that your image will show through clearly. A type layer is created above the background layer.

  4. With the type layer selected, press Ctrl+T to display the transform bounding box:

    1. Drag the handles on the transform box to resize and reshape your text as needed.
    2. Click Commit (the green checkmark) to commit your changes.

    Transform the text

  5. In the Layers palette, right-click on the text layer to display the pop-up menu. Select Simplify Layer. Simplifying the text layer changes it from a vector layer to a raster layer, and the text is no longer editable. Make sure that the text is in its final form before simplifying.

    Simplify the text layer

  6. Using the Magic Wand tool, select a single character. Make sure that Contiguous is selected on the options bar for the Magic Wand tool.

    Select a single character

  7. Copy and paste the image you want to use into the selection:

    1. Open the image you want to use.
    2. From the Select menu, select Select All or select a portion of the image to copy.
    3. From the Edit menu, select Copy.
    4. Open or shift focus to the image that contains the selected text character.
    5. From the Edit menu, select Paste Into Selection. The image is copied into the selection.

    Copy an image into a character

  8. Press Ctrl+T to resize and reposition the image in the text character:

    1. Grab a handle on the transform box and resize the image as needed. If you cannot see the handles, from the View menu, select Fit on Screen and the entire transform box will be displayed.
    2. Click Commit (the green checkbox).
  9. Repeat steps 6-8 for each character.
  10. Optionally, add special effects such as bevels and drop shadows to the text layer.

Related

Photoshop Elements: Fill Text with a Single Image

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Updated on August 4, 2011