PS: Outlined Text

[Toiny]

Outlined Text
Open a new PSD, choose a Commercial Use font (I choose SF Toon Time from fontsquirrel.com) and type your word (mine is “cartoon”)

Using your Magic Wand tool, select your word. Be sure to have the contiguous unselected. This will allow the Magic Wand to select all the bits-n-pieces of your letters. Once you see the marching ants doing their thing, you know you are on the right path:

With the marching ants marching, and still on the magic wand tool, right click with your mouse and choose make work path. Go ahead & click ok on the default tolerance of 2.0 pixels.

Set your tools palette to a basic photoshop brush. I like my edges a little uneven so I choose Calligraphic Brushes, Flat 15 pxfor this example. Also choose a color for your text outline. I choose blue for this example.

Create a new layer above your word then go to your path palette. If your path palette is not showing, enable it via window->paths. Make sure your path is selected, simply click on it to select (the whole shebang turns blue), then click on the bottom circle to stroke path. See my insert, highlighted in hot pink.

Now click off the work path, return to your Layers palette and turn off the text layer. Only the outline of your text will show.

Note: You can also use this technique to outline shapes. Stay tuned for next week when we use different brushes to color in our outline!