Add text to a photo

Making words readable on any photo

Text that looks fine on a plain wall disappears on a busy street. The Effects in the Properties panel handle that:

• Outline: a line around every letter in the color and width you choose, the meme look, readable on anything.
• Shadow: a soft dark copy behind the letters, with its blur, distance, angle and opacity.
• Glow: a soft light around the letters, for dark photos.
• Color: paints the whole text one color, handy for a quick change.

For a solid panel behind the words, draw a rectangle with the Shapes tool (U), give it a Radius for round corners, lower its opacity and move it under the text in the Layers panel. Size matters just as much: new text starts at about a fourteenth of the picture's shorter side, so it is readable at once. Keep lines short and place them in a corner or along the bottom to leave faces clear.

Fonts, weights and capitals

The font list holds every font installed on your PC: the ones that come with Windows, such as Arial, Georgia, Impact and Segoe Script, and any you have added. Type to search it; each name is shown in its own font. Weight runs from Thin to Black where the font has them.

The Properties panel adds Italic, Underline and Capitals, the alignment, the line height and the letter spacing. Pair a light color with a dark outline or shadow, or the other way round, for text that reads at a glance.

Each text is a layer of its own: click it with the Text tool to change the words, drag it with the Move tool, and press Delete with its layer selected to remove it. Color, font and size apply to the whole text, so for one word in another color, give it a text of its own and line the two up.

Text that stays sharp and editable

Octoolo keeps your words as text right up to the export. A typo can be fixed and a caption moved at any time, and the editor holds on to your work in progress if you close it and come back. Because the letters are drawn fresh at the size of the exported picture, they are as crisp on a 4000-pixel photo as they are on screen, even after you size or turn them.

File › Save keeps the text editable in an Octoolo project, and Save a copy as Photoshop (PSD)… keeps text layers as text for Photoshop. Text on a curve is a job for the Vector Editor, which types along a path. Writing on a video works much the same way in the Video Editor: see add text to video.