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PSP 7: Text on an Image I realized the other day that tutorials for Paint Shop Pro 7 are kind of falling off the grid. I don't use it a lot, but it's a good solid program and there are people who have it or can get it either free or cheap from the web. Since I know a few of those people, I thought I'd do some basic tutorials for it. To use this tutorial you need PSP 7. I believe you can still find a trial copy out there, but I totally recommend getting one of the more recent updates if you can. The full version of PSP 7 still costs about $99 so don't mess with this lower version unless you already have it.
Open PSP 7. Right click and save the image below to your computer. This is a picture I took of my dad in his balloon taking off from the field. This picture is copyright to me, so don't claim it as your own, but you can use it to make our graphic picture.
This is the actual size of the graphic, so it should appear in your PSP 7 as about this size. Our plan is to write "Up, Up and Away In My Beautiful Balloon" on this picture. Once you've saved the picture, open it in PSP 7. You can open image files by using either "file" and "open" or by clicking on the little icon shown below.
Then browse to where you saved your file.
If you look at the picture above, you'll see my cursor has just clicked and put a check mark in 'show preview'. With this button checked, the picture I'm choosing appears in the little white square next to it. This is great if you can't remember what name you saved your image as. It's especially helpful if you have a great big bunch of photos to choose from in a file folder. Once you have the right image selected, click "open".
Now you have this image on your PSP work area and all the tools and things to manipulate the image came to life. What doesn't automatically come to life is the 'layer palette', which we will need to use to work with this image and the text. Please click on this button to open the little window about layers.
Your PSP environment should now look something like this. The little menu down in the corner is the Layer Palette. Yours may be 'squashed'. You can make this stop by pressing the arrow.
If you click the arrow, it will lock the window to open, like my picture before. If you don't want to see the palette all the time, you can leave it and it will automatically minimize and maximize as you move your cursor on or off it. I find it irritating, frankly, so I leave mine open. Choose your text button and click anywhere in your image. As mentioned in the last lesson, this will open a new dialog box where you can manage your text.
Right off the bat, I think the text I have chosen "Wide Latin" is too large and bulky for what I want to say. Let's change the font to "Lucida Handwriting", keep the same size "36". Go ahead and finish typing this phrase: "Up, Up and Away" just like that. Once you're done typing it, select the text in the preview window so that it's highlighted in blue. If it's not highlighted, we can't make any changes to it and I want to change the color. Under "styles", leave the stroke as black, but let's change the "fill" to a solid color. Go ahead and click AND HOLD the button until a little mini-menu appears. Choose the paintbrush to get to a solid color from a pattern.
This time, let's select a custom color from our picture for the text. I kind of like the rosy pink stars and that color should look great on the blue. Click and drag the "Text Entry" box to move it away from the top of the balloon so you can see the balloon.
Click quickly on the "Fill" button and a new window should open, your color palette. You'll also notice that your cursor is a little 'eye dropper' tool now. This will pick up any color from the image. Move your eye dropper over the star in the picture. As you move, you'll see the color at the bottom of your MAIN color palette (clear to the right hand side) changing as you go. Once you get a good color that you like, stop and click.
Well, my capture program shows my eyedropper tool far away from the star, but I assure you the color I'm getting is from the star itself. You can see in the 2nd picture the pink color is showing on the right side of my PSP environment. I liked that one, so I went ahead and clicked there. The value of learning how to pick up colors from the picture is that it really customizes your overall image and lets your text look like part of the image, like it should have been there all along. Once you have the color selected, go ahead and press "OK" in the color palette box and also in the "Text Entry" box. Your text should now look something like this:
Let's move the text more onto the picture kind of above the balloon. You can use the text tool to move it by clicking on the little square in the middle of the overall text, or you can use your 'mover' tool from the left side menu. This is the text tool method. When you are in the right spot, your cursor will change to the below set of arrows. There are many sets of arrows that will appear as you move your cursor around your image. Each one does a different thing. This one below is just to move your text from the center.
The "mover" method is shown below. On your left hand menu, click the "mover" button.
Then move your cursor over ANY PART of the text. You're looking for your cursor to change to the arrows as shown in the text mover tool picture (also shown below). With this tool however, you can click anywhere on the text to move. With the text tool, you MUST be in the exact middle.
This one gives you a lot more area to choose from to move the text around. If you do not click on the text, but end up clicking on the background, nothing will be selected and you won't be able to move your text. However you want to do it, move your text kind of over on top of the balloon.
Let's add the other half of our text. Click on your text tool and then click on the left hand side of the trees below the balloon. Your text dialog box will open, automatically repeating "Up, Up and Away" in the same colors and fonts as the first text. Change the text to read, "In My Beautiful Balloon!"
Oh drat! Our text is far too long to fit on the picture. Well, we can fix this two ways. The easiest way is to click the enter button after Beautiful, which will put that word under the rest, flush to the left side.
I'd rather have "Balloon!" centered, so let's change the alignment of the text. Right above the text you'll see some buttons you probably recognize to "bold", "italisize", "underline", "strikethrough" and then the alignments of "flush left", "center", and "flush right". Let's click "Center".
Remember to be sure all of your text is highlighted. If only the word "Balloon" is highlighted, that's the only part that will center and your words will look a little funky. But now you should see this on your image (you may have to click "ok" and move the text fully onto your picture.)
Go ahead and click OK and using the text tool, move this text to the center of the area of the trees. If you aren't happy with the positioning or want a more exact "center", you can click on "objects" "align" "horizontal alignment". This will move this piece of text to the center between the left and right sides of your image.
Now, if you used the 'mover' tool, something odd probably happened to you. You moved BOTH sections of text at the same time. This is great if both are exactly where you want them, but not so good if one is out of alignment with the other. This is what your 'layer palette' window is open for.
This is what your layer palette looks like. You can see there is a layer called 'background' and another (highlighted in blue) called "layer 1". Each one has a little picture next to it and a pair of glasses. You also have a "+" sign next to "layer 1". If you run your cursor over the 'background', you'll see that a very small preview of what that layer is will appear.
The "background" is our image of the balloon as you can see from the above. "Layer 1" is our text. Go ahead and click the "+" sign. You can now see both of our text words appear.
In my image, I used the 'horizontal align' to make "In My Beautiful" center. But I didn't do that to "Up, Up and Away" and I want it to match. Click on "Up, Up and Away" to highlight it and you'll see the focus shift from one set of text to the other. The highlight will just be to BOLD the text (as shown above.) Once selected, go ahead and center the text horizontally, as I showed you above. Now let's add a little 'drop shadow' to our text to make it stand out from the picture. To do this, we have to change our text layer (layer 1) from "text" to "raster". I'd be happy to tell you what "raster layer" means to PSP, all I know is that it means "a layer you can manipulate". To change it, right click where it says "layer 1" and choose "convert to raster layer".
Your layer palette will change to look like this:
At the top of your screen, choose "Effects", then go down to "3D Effects" and then choose "Drop Shadow". This will open a new window where we can decide what kind of drop shadow to add to our picture.
The left window (checkerboard) shows your text as it is now. The right window shows what it will look like after you add the shadow. To see the text, put your cursor in the right window and click and drag UP until you can see something. A little hand will appear to show where you're dragging from.
Now you can see what kind of shadow we'll have if we leave the default settings shown above. Let's change it just a little bit to bring the shadow a little closer to the text. Change the "vertical" and "horizontal" to "5". Increase "opacity" to 100. Leave the blur at "5". Change the color from black to white by clicking on the color block, then choosing the white block from 'basic colors' and clicking "ok". Go ahead and click "OK".
Your image should now look like this:
Which is pretty awesome! But...let's add a quick and easy border to the image so it looks like it's been framed. Click on "Image" and then "Add Border".
You'll notice right below it is "picture frame". That function will provide you with a small selection of pre-made frames to put around or inside your picture. It's kind of fun - feel free to explore! There should be some PSP 7 pre-made frames on the net. You can find them through Google with "PSP 7 Frames". Again, don't be too disappointed if not many come up. PSP 7 is an older program and there's not a lot left on the net for it. But we're going to just add a simple PINK border, so click as shown above. Oops! An error message came up!
Don't panic. What this says is that our image has multiple layers (background and text) and that these must be merged into one single image before we can add a border to the whole image. Go ahead and click "YES" to this message and PSP will merge all the layers for you all by itself while moving on into the border screen. Now you see this:
The border size is shown in PIXELS and not in inches. If you zoom way way way way into your picture, you'll see that it is a series of tiny little dots, or pixels. One dot = One pixel. I think for our picture, a 10 pixel border is fine, so we'll leave it alone. You'll also notice a box marked "symmetric". A checkmark in this box means that the border will be the same size on all sides. If we were going to change the pixel size, entering a new number where the 10 is will change all the other numbers to match. If we uncheck the box, we can make a box that's 10 on one side and 15 on another. But we're just going to leave a 10 pixel box all the way around, so it's fine like it is. Go ahead and click "OK". Now we have a pink border around our image.
That might look a lot silly on this orange background of mine, so let's add another, smaller border in black. To do this, we need to swap our pink color for our black. On your right side 'color palette' menu, click the little arrow between your black color and your pink color. This will swap the colors around, making black the 'fill' color and pink the 'stroke' color.
Now go back to "image", "add border" and this time, change the number from 10 to 2.
See how all the numbers changed when you changed just one? Go ahead and click "OK". A tiny little black outline just appeared around your picture.
Save your picture. Click on "file" then "export" and "jpg optimizer".
The reason I save my files this way is that it will save the picture with the best possible quality for a .jpg that it can. You can can use 'save as', but you don't get quite as much control over the quality as you do with the 'export'. Go ahead and click "OK" to the defaults there and save your file as "Balloon2" to be sure you don't save over the original picture, which you can then use again. You now have your finished image!
I hope you had fun with this tutorial and that you learned some good techniques!
Super PSP 7 Tip #2! Here's a super tip. You can "undo" and "redo" actions in PSP very easily with the use of the following buttons:
What's great about these very easy tools is that you can UNDO as many steps as you've done. Let's take our above tutorial for text. We've gotten to the 'add a border' step, but something is off with our text. You can click "UNDO" (the arrow pointing left) until you get to where you made a mistake. You can then move forward again after you repair the mistake. But if you find you didn't make a mistake and you just undid everything you had and you want it back, you can click the 'REDO" button (the arrow pointing right) until you get back to where you'd been. What's important to know is that any change you make after using 'undo' will negate the 'redo' button. If you change something, it will erase all the other steps you just did. So, I go back three steps and change something I did, now I can not go forward the three steps, I simply have to do them over. You can open a window to view all of your commands, which makes it real easy to back up. Click "edit" and "command history".
Click on it to open the command history window.
This shows all of the commands you've done that you can undo. If you click on "10", all the commands from the top to #10 will highlight and you can click "undo" to undo all of them at once. This can save some time if you know where you made your mistake. If you don't know where you made the mistake, you'd probably just want to use the arrow to undo a command at a time. What's the BEST thing is that the undo command is available to each and every image individually. If you're working on more than one project, each one will have a separate undo history.
Need to ask a question? Have a suggestion or just get confused?
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