3 Ways to Stroke Text in GIMP | Easily Outline Text

hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you three different ways to stroke text using I'll be using version 2.10 point 20 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial [Music] before I get into that don't forget to check out my website at Davies media design.com as always I have tons of video tutorials on here like in book of layers and free software help articles so definitely check that out you're gonna roll it like in 2.10 master class from beginner to pro photo editing on you to me you get a role in any my skill share classes by visiting Gibbs school calm in can get more with a premium membership to Davies media design I'll include all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so quick note I will be using only features that are built directly into there are some plugins such as the gimmick plug-in that allow you to stroke text but just to keep things simple I'm going to be using everything found directly inside a also I do recommend updating to the latest version of that way you can take advantage of all the features I'll be showing you in today's tutorial although two out of the three of these can be used in pretty much any version of so let's start off by creating our text I'll come over here to my tool box and click to grab my text tool and I'm just going to click on my composition turn on my caps lock key you'll see I'm using the canon font here heavy italic and let's change the size I'm gonna go with 300 at the start click on my text box again and I'll type stroke and I'll hit ctrl a to select all my text and now let's spread out the letters here we can do that using this right numerical field here which is the kerning setting I'm just gonna go with something like 25 I don't want these being too spread out then I'll come over here and in the first tool group I'll grab my alignment tool click on my text and I'm gonna align this relative to image and I'm just going to Center align my text and I'll hit the M key to grab my move tool alright so we have our text set up let's start off with the first method for adding a stroke to our text so this method is only going to be available in 2.10 point 20 or newer and that is using the drop shadow filter the newly updated drop shadow filter that is so what we're gonna do here we're going to stay directly on our text layer and I'll come over to filters light and shadow drop shadow for starters this will just put a drop shadow under the text that's not what we want to do so over here under the X&Y slider make sure the little chain link Caan is linked and I'm just going to middle click with my mouse wheels so the middle mouse click whatever that is on your mouse and then I'm just going to erase that so I'll hit the backspace key to get rid of the two there hit the tab key and so that's going to get rid of the values for X and Y and you can see that stroke is now moved directly under our text next what I need to do is turn the blur radius all the way down to zero and finally I'll come over here to grow radius and I'll increase the size of this and you'll see that's going to add a stroke so there's a decent amount of customization we can do with this first off my opacity is set to 0.5 so that's why this is gray whereas the color that we have selected here is actually black so we can click on this color to change the color to whatever we want let's go with maybe this green color click OK and then if we wanted to turn up the opacity we can either just drag the slider to the left or right so dragging it to the right will turn it up and we can go all the way up to 100% I'm not really sure why this goes beyond 100% there but if you wanted to you could middle click on this erase this value entirely type a 1 hit the enter key that just means 100% opacity I recommend keeping the clipping set to adjust which is just going to adjust the size of the layer to make sure it includes anything that goes outside it and you could change the blending mode of the color that you're using of the stroke if you want to I'll leave this set to the default a couple other things I want to show you so let's increase the grow radius here so right now this is set to circle which means the stroke around our text is going to be more of a rounded shape if I hold ctrl and zoom in with my mouse wheel I can change the grow shape here to square you can see what that does it makes our edges more pointed but you can see it doesn't really do a perfect job for example right here this is kind of a weird looking corner and as you can see right here this area is sort of wobbly and then it has a weird meeting spot here same down here so not perfect but you can always adjust the size of this if you want and you can see the effect of that and the last option for the Grove shape is the diamond shape and this is essentially going to give you that beveled edge or that chamfer look so the corners are going to get cut off as opposed to being pointed or rounded and so that's one of the main benefits of using the drop shadow for your strokes text because it does provide many options here for the style of your stroke so click OK to apply that hold ctrl and zoom out there is our first method the second method for creating a stroke around your text in my opinion is going to be the best method and this is essentially using a path to create your text stroke so coming back here I'll hit control Z to backup and that's going to get rid of that stroke we just created so for this method there are two options we can come over here alt click on our stroke text come down here and create a new layer and I've already got my named stroke because I did this earlier and I'll click OK then I'll come over to the paths tab then I'll come over here and click on this icon to convert the selection area I just created around my text to a path so there is our path you can rename this stroke text I have my caps lock key on sorry about that now I'll need to deselect this I'll go ctrl shift a to deselect it or you can go to select none next what I'll do is come over here and click to stroke my path so here we have the stroke path dialog and you can choose your stroke style this is why I like this so much there's many options here so we can just go with a typical line and that line can be a solid color or based on whatever pattern you currently have selected anti-aliasing is just going to ensure a smoother stroke you could choose the line width in pixels so let's go with the larger line width we'll go with 10 for now and then there's this little line style drop-down and here you have a variety of options you could change the cap style which is basically how the stroke ends the join style so anytime the path corners on something like for example the e right here you could choose whether you want this to be more of a square shape a round shape or a beveled shape so this is the equivalent of that square circle or diamond option when we're using the drop shadow method the miter limit is just going to control how far out a pointed corner is going to go so if you do go with this pointed corner join style there may be instances if you set the line width really high where the corner is going to go way out here the miter limit is just going to basically cap how far out it can go and then the coolest part of this is you can set up a dash pattern if you want for your stroke and you have various dash presets here so we've got just a regular line you can do long dashes dots etc so let's go with some dense dots here for this example and the last thing I'll mention is that you can stroke this with a paint tool so for example if I chose this option and I went with one of my paint tools you can see you can use any of these but let's go with the paint brush option it's going to paint with whatever brush head is the active brush head right now and you can see that by coming over here selecting the paint tool so right now we have this brush head this is for my last tutorial so it would paint with that brush head along the stroke but I'm actually going to come up here and choose the stroke line option the last thing you need to know before we actually stroke this is I can change the color of the stroke over here by changing my foreground color so whatever our foreground color is currently set to is what's going to get painted on here so if I go with this orange color that's what's going to get painted I'll click OK so now I'll come over and click stroke and there you can see our text has been stroked I went with the dashed line option if you'll remember so that's why that's showing up there I'll hit control Z to undo that if I come over here I can unhide the path and that's showing you where exactly that stroke is located here and this is useful because I can come over to my toolbox grab my path tool and I can click on this path and you'll see all these nodes that are created and I can come in here and customize this so we can basically make the stroke whatever shape we want so I'm going to come over here and delete this stroke that I created because I do want to show you an alternative method for adding a path around this text to stroke so let's come back here to the layers come back to our text layer and now I'll go to layer text a path and if I come over here to my paths tab now you can see we have a path again and it's added that stroke around our text let me hide this path and come back over here to the layers panel so another huge benefit to this method is you can add multiple strokes to your text fairly easily so let me show you what I'm talking about we still have orange setup as our color let's stroke this text so I'll come over and we'll go with the line width of 10 for the first stroke let me move this inside the frame and let's change the line style here from the dotted lines to just a normal line and I'll come down and click stroke so there is our first stroke right now the stroke is located on top of the text so I'll come over here to the layers panel let's move this below the original text so now it's behind the text and next I'm going to add a second stroke to this so I'll come over here create a new layer will name this stroke to click OK we can either make this stroke smaller than the original stroke we just drew or we can make it larger if we want it to be larger which I do in this case we'll have to move this below the original stroke layer so now let's stroke on this one so I'll go to paths and we'll click to stroke the path again this time let's go with a larger line width so let's go with 20 and I'll change the color of this so we can see it better let's go with the red color click OK so now I'll come over here and click stroke and let's hide this path and now you can see we have two different strokes here on our text so let's come back to the layers panel delete those two layers and now we're back here on our text layer the third and final method for adding a stroke to your text is kind of an old-school method I don't like it as much because the lines of the stroke itself aren't as crisp however it does have its benefits as I'll show you here in a second so for this method we're going to come over here and alt click on our stroke layer and by the way if alt clicking on this layer doesn't work you can always go to layer transparency alpha to selection that will perform the same thing but once we have our text selected I'll come over here to select grow and now we can grow this selection area by however many pixels or whatever unit we want to do so I'll stick with pixels and let's say we want to increase this by 10 pixels I'll click OK so you'll see that we'll expand the selection beyond the text and it's going to create this sort of stroke effect so now what we need to do is create a new layer so I'll come over here click to create a new layer and we'll just name this one stroke and I'll click okay let's move this layer below the original text layer so now we can fill this in with whatever we want so if I wanted to I could click and drag this foreground color inside the selection area now we have a red stroke I'll hide ctrl Z to undo that so I alluded earlier to the fact that this does have a main benefit and that main benefit is that you can add gradients inside here so basically you can create gradient strokes so I'll come over here and let's click and hold on this tool group and grab the gradient on our stroke layer now I can click and drag this gradient and because this is a live gradient we can adjust the midpoint and the end points etc I do have an entire tutorial dedicated to this tool so I won't get into it now but I can also change the shape of course so I'll go with linear and I can change the color so let's go red to orange instead of red to white and once I have the gradient colors I want I'll click on the gradient itself and then hit the enter key and there's our stroke another benefit to this is I can come over here create a new layer and I can name this stroke two again so we can do multiple strokes with this method I'll drag this below and I'll come over here and go to select grow and this will grow this based on its current size so if I set this to 10 it'll grow this in additional 10 pixels and I'll click OK and now I'll come over and change the color so let's just go with this random color here and this random color and once again I can draw my gradient here let's swap the direction of this gradient these colors don't look great but you guys get the point I'll hit the enter key and there's our second stroke so if I hit control shift a and hold ctrl and zoom in you'll see the edges of this aren't super smooth so they are kind of jagged there that is one downside to this method as you can see here as well the other downside to this is you can really only create these circular edges here so the rounded corners so in other words you can't really do the pointed corners or the beveled corners those are my 3 methods for creating a stroke around text in let me know which method was your favorite in the comments but that's it for this tutorial thanks for watching if you liked it you could check out my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to be another fight each time I have a brand new tutorial you can check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 22,925

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020, text effects, text tutorial, stroke text, text strokes, paint along text, outline text, GIMP 2.10.20

Id: 4K3u5lneWKY

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020