Make Cut-Out Text in Photoshop

YOU’LL NEED THIS ADOBE PHOTOSHOP

Subscribe to an app or package at www.adobe.com. BACKGROUND IMAGE You also need something you want to say.

CUT- OUT TEXT is a staple of the advertising world, and Amazon Prime’s Preacher series uses it to great effect in its titles. Blending images and text in this way looks stylish, and has uses far beyond violent, stylized comic-book adaptations.

Photoshop has some sophisticated typography tools, the match of those in some page layout software, and full support for vector fonts, so you can do just about anything you like with lines of text—you can even set full paragraphs if you want, but Photoshop isn’t really the best application for doing that.

Rather than cutting out parts of your background image and pasting them over your letter shapes, to give the impression that the letters have been turned into holes showing the layer underneath them, you actually do turn the letters into holes. It’s called a “clipping mask” in Photoshop parlance, and it’s used for all kinds of graphic design elements and special effects tricks. Master this, and there’s nothing you can’t do in Photoshop.

1 CHOOSE A BACKGROUND IMAGE A little planning goes a long way here. You want an image with an area that will still be interesting when you put the text over it and only part of it is visible, coupled with some strong interest in the areas not covered in text. If your background image is recognizable enough, you can go ahead and completely cover it in text, but make sure the letterforms fall in such a way that the most recognizable parts of the image show through—the eyes and mouth if you’re using a face, for example. We’ve chosen a photo of a motherboard [ Image A], as if this magazine wasn’t already full enough with them, and what a beauty it is: that pin-grid array, that ZIF locking lever, those capacitors.... We get the shivers just thinking about it.

2 FIND A FONT Enough of that. Let’s cover up the board’s nakedness with some text. Choose your font with care, because a typeface can say a great deal about your project, even before a viewer has begun to read the words. Some are designed for use in large blocks of running copy, while others are meant for shouting headlines, and some are novelty typefaces, meant for decoration as much as conveying information. What we’re saying is: Don’t cover your image in Comic Sans or Strumpf if you want to be taken seriously. Also, consider the layout of your lettering. Groups of three letters look good, but whole words arranged in a vertical stack can also have a lot of impact. Don’t try to cram too much in, because readability from a distance is key with a design like this.

3 TWEAK YOUR TEXT The “Character” panel, found under the “Window” menu, and its brother the “Paragraph” panel [ Image B] are the ones you need to control type in your composition. As you’ve probably deduced from their names, “Character” is for use on individual letters, while “Paragraph” affects whole blocks of text at a time. They do slightly different things, with “Character” geared toward letter sizes and spacing, while “Paragraph” contains options for alignment and indents. Type out your text, use Enter to put it on as many lines as you want, select it with the mouse, and use “Character” to change font size.

The standard Photoshop drop-down menu only goes as high as 72pt, which in these days of high-resolution images looks comically small. We had to go up to 300pt for our image, which isn’t particularly large. Adjust the vertical spacing of your lines using the box with two letter As on top of one another—for tight spacing, make it less than your point size—we went for 250pt [ Image C]. Using the two capital T boxes, you can adjust the height and width of your letters, while V/A is for kerning (how close the letters are to one another). Play around, and get your text looking the way you want. 4 ADD SOMETHING TO CUT THROUGH Getting on to the clipping mask, first we need to provide it with something to clip through. We’re going to use the Rectangle tool to create a simple black rectangle that covers half our image. This appears as a Live Shape, and therefore on its own layer, so there’s no need to create a new one first. Move your text so it’s on the same side of your image as the black rectangle. 5 RE-ARRANGE YOUR LAYERS Now we need to do a little layer shuffling. Create a new layer and fill it with black, or a color that fits your image and the mood you’re trying to convey, placing it just above “Background” in the stack [ Image D]. Double click “Background” to turn it into a normal layer, and move it to the top of the stack. Select your text and rectangle layers, and use Ctrl-G to group them, placing them second in the stack. 6 CLIP AWAY Now for the clipping. Right-click the top layer and select “Create Clipping Mask.” Immediately, you should be able to see through to the layers below [ Image E]. The clever thing about these masks is that your text remains editable, and you can still play with Blend modes to change how the layers relate to each other— though they may not respond precisely as you expect. The rectangle shape can be altered by selecting its layer and using “Edit Free > Transform.” Keep in mind the way the layers are stacked, if you’re wondering why fading a layer out is affecting a completely different part of the image. Save your work as a PSD file to preserve the layer structure, and export as a PNG when you want to share it, using “File > Export > Export As.” Adobe is in the process of retiring “Save For Web,” but if you want to use it instead, it’s still there on the “Export” menu, marked “Legacy.”