GIMP Basics: Text Tool In-Depth Tutorial

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be giving you an in-depth look at the text tool before we get into this tutorial I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design comm as always we have tons of video and text tutorials on here so definitely check that out you can also enroll in our best-selling 2.10 photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher on udemy Annie can support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and get some awesome extras in return and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so for this tutorial I'm going to be using of course the latest version of which at the time of this tutorial is 2.10 point 8 but the text tool is a very commonly used tool and you can start by accessing it over here in your toolbox you can also hit T on your keyboard that's the shortcut key for the text tool I've already gone ahead and typed up some text here and this is right here this is a layer that has some effects on it so this isn't a text layer right now so let me just go ahead and hide that layer and what you want to do to start is you want to click on your canvas and you'll see these four little boxes here that indicates that you were about to start typing some text and with my caps lock key on I can go ahead and type my text which in this case will be Davies media design and you'll notice that while I was typing my text the text box just went along with that text let me back it up here and start over so you'll see that right when I create my first letter the text box will just expand to fit that first letter and as I type more letters the text box is just continuing to expand with the letters the reason it's doing that is because the text box is a dynamic text box by default so anytime you just click once on here this is going to create a dynamic text box that is going to move with the size of your text let me just click on that new layer I just created and delete that in my layers panel we're gonna go over the text layer in a second here so a dynamic text box is the default when you're using the text tool but let's say I delete all this text here so I'll hit my backspace key there to delete my text so instead of just typing right now let's say I click on one of these corners and drag this out because I want my text box to fit or I want my text to fit within this text area right here now you'll see that as I my text instead of the text box moving along with my text it's just going to type my text within this new text box I've created so this is a fixed text box so let's say I continue to type and I type in tutorials you'll see that that will automatically go to the next line because it's trying to fit the text in the text box and if I continue to type you'll see that this starts to get cut off here by the text box what I can do is I can elongate this text box like this so just clicking on the bottom of my text box and dragging this down and now that is going to fit all my text within this fixed text box here so those are the two types of text boxes found in let me just delete all my text here and hit the backspace key and let me come back over here to my layers panel and delete that text layer so starting over with the text tool when I click on my composition and I type that text and this is again a dynamic text box now over here we are going to create by default a text layer so this text layer is over here in the layers panel and this is just telling you that this is editable text and it contains text data within this layer so I can always come back to a text layer and with my text tool highlight this text and make changes to the text we're going to get into what happens when a text layer becomes a regular layer like what you saw here with the original text layer at the beginning of the tutorial but for now just know that when a text layer is showing up over here in the layers panel it just means that this layer contains text data and that data can be edited or in other words your text can still be edited and you'll notice here too that the name of your text layer is by default going to take on your first line of text so in this case because Davies media design is my first line of text that is going to name my text layer Davies media design I can always come back here and click on this and just rename this text layer so for instance I can name this text if I want and that's just like any other layer in but I'm just going to change this back to Davies media design with the caps lock key on so there are two options for making changes to your text the first one is the text tool options right here below your toolbox so this area is your tool box this area is the tool options so when you have your text tool selected it's going to bring up your text tool options below here the other option is this floating box right here and this is known as the text toolbox so this is a semi-transparent box that's going to display just above the new text box that you created and we'll get into that a little bit later but for now I'm going to come over here to my text tool options so one main difference between these two options for editing your text is that when you're using the text tool options you don't have to have your text selected here and you could always tell your text is selected when there's those yellow boxes around your text on the other hand if you are using this text tool box up here you do have to have whatever text you're trying to change selected before you can make those changes so I'm gonna start over here with our tool options or text tool options so I don't need to select this text it's just going to make changes to everything within the text box here so for starters if I want to change the font I can click on here and I can manually type my font name so let's say I know that I want to change this to Arial you'll see that as I type aerial it'll finish it for me and it'll also display the various Arial options here so let's say I wanted to go with aerial heavy I can click that and now we've changed our font you can also use what's called the fonts selector by clicking this font button here so when I click on that that's gonna bring up our fonts selector dialog here so within this dialog you've got all of the fonts that are found within your so either the fonts that come with gift by default or the ones you installed and I do have a tutorial on my website on how to install custom fonts but you'll also see down here you can decrease or increase the size of the font preview so on the left side here you've got a preview of what your font should look like and then on the right side you have the name of that font so you can increase or decrease that preview size you can also change this from a list view which is what this is set up as now to a grid view so let's say you only want to be able to see the previews of the fonts so you don't want to see the font names you could set that to the grid view and then increase the size of those previews so that's just a customization you can have in I'm gonna change this back to the list view because I do like the list view a little bit better and then right here you have the option to open up the font selection dialog window so when I click on that that is going to open up my fonts here as a dockable dialog so for me this opened up my font selection dialog window with some of my other dockable dialogs up here for some of you it may open it up here like this as a floating dockable dialogue that's what makes these dockable is you can always just move them around and place them kind of whatever you want but in this window it allows you to more easily scroll through these fonts so it's just a little bit of a faster way to scroll through the fonts and test them out on your active font here or on your active text so I'm just gonna come back up here to this agency FB bold condensed font and I believe this is a font that I may have downloaded separately if that's the case I'll include a link to the free font download all right so next you can adjust your size using this size option here so right now this is set to 150 and the unit's right here are set to pixels so you can change the units if you want and then you can use the up or down arrows to increase or decrease the size of your font you can also manually type in the size of your font so let's say I want this to be 200 pixels I can type 200 here hit the enter key and that will change the size of my font to 200 below the font size you'll see a checkbox here called use editor if I click on that that's going to open up the text editor this is sort of the old-school way of editing text within so what I can do here is I can type some more text if I want and you'll see it'll show up over here in my text box and because this is a dynamic text box this will go off the page if I highlight this and hit the answer key you'll see that I'll start a new line for me and I'll put my caps lock key on and just type tutorials so you can edit your text within this text editor here you should also be able to do things like change the size of the font and change the actual font type here but as you can see here this doesn't really work the way it's supposed to so it's a little buggy and that's one reason why I don't recommend using this another reason is just that I think the on canvas editor is a little bit easier anyway it's a little bit more intuitive and it's just the new way of editing your text within so I'm just going to close this down and ctrl Z to undo all that below the use editor checkbox is another checkbox called an tile icing so this is going to smooth your fonts so let's say I hold ctrl and scroll in here if I uncheck anti-icing you'll see our font becomes a lot more pixelated it becomes a lot blockier and looks like a lot lower quality so the anti-icing is just going to apply a smoothing effect to your font and make your fonts look a little bit smoother hinting is supposed to also work on the quality of your font so if I hover over here it says hinting alters the font outline to produce a crisp bitmap at small sizes so this is used when you have the smaller size text so let's say we set this to 10 as our text size and I'm just gonna hold alt and move this text a little bit over here so if I hold ctrl and scroll in a little bit to zoom in on my text this should in theory make our text a little bit more readable at smaller sizes so if I set the hinting to full you'll see it did change that a little bit so if i zoom out a little bit I am zoomed in a lot right now so that's why this looks so bad but this you'll see this does change the font here and this is supposed to make your font a little bit more clear when you're using smaller font sizes I'm just gonna set this to none for now and I'm gonna come back here and change my size back to 200 and then hold ctrl and zoom out there and unfortunately this was set to a fixed text box size so let me just come down here and actually change this to dynamic and we're gonna get into that in a second but I'll hold the Alt key and that'll allow me to move my text around and I'll hold the ctrl and just zoom out a little bit and I'll just click off of my text to deselect the text the next option here is the color box and obviously as that name suggests it allows you to change the color of your text so let me just come over here and click and drag this up to the top left corner that's going to change my color here to white and I'll click OK and now you'll see that our text has this white color and it's a lot easier to read the next option is the justify option so this just determines how your text is justified within the text box or how it's aligned so you have the standard left justified right justified centered or filled so if this is a fixed text box so right now this is dynamic so let me just click and drag the text box out a little bit like so so you'll see that with this set to justify Center this is automatically going to center our text within the text box so it's not centering our text to the entire composition it's only centering it to the text box and then I can left justify it or right justify it and then the fill option is only going to work really when you have a paragraph in there so let me just click this back to center and let me come back over here to my layers panel and then I'm also gonna come over here to my alignment tool and I just want to align my text so it's in the center of my image so I'll click on that text box there and then I'm going to click to align this to the center and I'm going to do that again so now this is horizontally and vertically centered to our image and then I'll come back over here to my text tool so the next option is to indent the first line and we're gonna go over that once I import a paragraph into here but then the next option here is to increase the space between two lines of text so let me click on my text again and just expand my text box a little bit here and I'm going to click on here hit the enter key and with my caps lock key on I'll just type a second line again so give tutorials and actually let me just change the text box here to dynamic so that's going to fit our text box to the size of our text so if I come over here to the option that allows me to adjust the spacing between the two lines of text if I increase this you'll see our text will become more spaced apart so our two lines of text are now more spaced apart or if I turn this down so you can't make this a negative value it'll bring our text lines closer together and then our next option here is to adjust the letter spacing this is also called kerning so when I'm adjusting the letter spacing if I increase it it's just increasing the spacing between our letters and if I decrease it it is going to decrease the spacing between our letters I'm just going to set this to zero and same with the letter spacing here I'll set that to zero and then let me just come over here and realign this so I'm just going to align this back to the center and if I grab my text tool again there is actually a shortcut key if you want to increase the letter spacing or the line spacing so if I just select all of my text here and hold the Alt key and I use my up arrow you'll see that is going to increase the line spacing here so I'm just holding the up arrow right now and you'll see that our letters are getting more spread apart or our lines are getting more spread apart sorry and now if I use the left or right keys on my keyboard so if I go to the right is going to increase the letter spacing and if I go to the left it's going to decrease my letter spacing so again I'm holding the Alt key and using the arrow keys on my keyboard and I'm just gonna reset this back to zero so the next option here is the Box option and this is what we've been going through throughout this entire tutorial which is the ability to change this from a dynamic box to a fixed text box so again if this is set to a fixed text box the text box is going to be a fixed width and height versus dynamic which is just going to fit to the text size the next option here is the language option that actually does not really work as intended at least in my experience so if I select this and I just said to English this should allow you to basically just have all your lettering show up as it would in the English language and you're supposed to be able to change this to different languages so if I type like an M for example you'll see all the languages that start with an M that are within it could just be my lack of knowledge about other languages but I haven't noticed any difference between any of the other languages in the English language within so I'm just going to set this to English you can make most of the same changes using the text tool box here that I alluded to at the beginning of the tutorial so here you can change the font and you do have to manually type the font here so I'll just type Arial for example again and that'll change this font to Arial and also quick reminder you do have to have all the text selected when you're using this option up here I'm just going to change this back to that agency font we were using you can also change the size of the text the units that you're using to determine the size then you have the ability to change the baseline of the selected text which is just a fancy way of saying the line spacing and then you can also adjust the kerning here which is another way of saying the letter spacing you can also adjust the color of your text within this text box so click OK there and you'll see that will change I'm just gonna change us back to white and then you also have some new options over here which allows you to make the font more bold if your font isn't already bold like this font is you can make it italicized you can also underline the text and you could strike through the text if I click this option here it's going to clear the styles that we added to this text so you'll see all those styles disappear there so as you guys saw me doing earlier in the tutorial you can move your text box around with the text tools still selected by holding the Alt key and that just allows you to move this text wherever you can also come over and use the move tool so if I grab the move tool you'll see this will actually give us a little bit better of a picture as we are moving this around so it kind of moves it around in real time and that just makes it easier to see where you're moving this text too you do have to be clicked on the character itself so you have to be clicked on one of the letters in your text in order to move the text if you click anywhere else it's going to move whatever layer is behind it so in this case the background layer so hit control Z that's a big problem beginners have they're trying to move the text box around and they're clicked inside the text box but it's moving whatever layer is behind it and that's because you have to be on a character in order for that text to move I'm gonna go back to my text tool and click on my text box to make it active for my next feature so when I right-click on here you'll see there's a menu that pops up this is called the text context menu so there's several options here the first four are your standard cut copy paste and delete options and so for example if I highlight this Davies text right click and go to cut it'll cut that out and then if I come over here to the n right-click and paste it'll paste that there let me undo that though so I'll right click again to bring up that text context menu so the next option here is to open a text file and this is actually really useful because if you have a bunch of text that you've already typed up that you want to bring into you can use this option to bring in that text that you created all at once you don't have to come in here and manually retype all that text so for example let me just delete all this text and I'm going to change the size and everything of my text so I'll change the size to 12 let's say I'm going to change the font back to Arial and I'll just keep the color set to white here and now let's say I want to click and drag this to create a text box so that it's only on the left side of my image so now we have our fixed text box here and if I right-click and go to open text file so I have a text file that I created in advance it's lorem ipsum text which is just like dummy text it's a pretty industry standard way of using dummy text to fill in a text area but you'll notice this is a dot txt file in my research this was the only file type that works so if you're you're trying to use a word file or something that's not going to work just save it as a dot txt file using something like notepad so anyway I'll hit open and you can't see it right now really because the color of the text here is actually showing up as my foreground color so let me just change this color to white and I'll click OK and so here is all the text that was in that text document and I can of course increase the font size if I want so here is all of that paragraph text I can of course go in here and manually just add a space between the lines here or between the paragraphs and I'll just shriek that text down a little bit so now you'll see we have many paragraphs that we brought in here all at once it saved us a bunch of typing that we would have had to do if we wanted to manually bring all this text in the and while I have all this text in here let me also just demonstrate this feature right here which is the ability to indent the first line of text in each paragraph so let me also just bring the justify over here to the left and if I increase this value here you'll see each of the first lines of our paragraph text here is now indented and it's indented by 50 right now I can just continue to increase that or of course I can reset that back to zero but actually I'm gonna bring this up to 50 because I do like having that first line indented and I can also come over here and fill all the sins so you'll see that when I do that now with this paragraph text it is now filling up our entire text box with the text and that's usually what people use when they have a newspaper or a magazine and they need to fill in a certain space with the text and that just gives this text box a cleaner look now so let me right click on this now to bring up our text context menu again so the next option here is the clear option and this will clear all of your text within your text box so when I click on that you'll see now all of our text is gone and now that I've done that let me just bring this back to zero so that our text that we bring in here won't be indented by default and I'm also going to reset the justify here to centered and I'm gonna change my text box back to a dynamic text box I'm gonna increase my font back to 200 here and also change the font to agency again and with my caps lock key on I'm just going to retype my title text here and then grab my alignment tool and recenter this up and I'll grab my text tool again and click on our text box and I'm gonna right click on here so our next option within the text context menu is the path from text option so if I click on that what that's going to do is create a path that's going to outline our text and you can't see it right now because the path is hidden but if I come over here to our past dialog you'll see there's a path created here called Davies media design and that's because it is the shape of our text layer that we created so if I unhide that you'll see our text now has this sort of red outline going around it that's the path that was created so the cool thing about this if I come back over here to my layers panel and let me actually just delete this duplicate text layer that we had going on there but if I create a new layer and I name this text outline and let me turn my caps lock key off fill this with transparency and click OK and come back over here to my paths dialog box here what I can do is I can click on this path layer click the stroke option here and it's going to stroke this with a solid color if I have the stroke line option checked and this solid color option checked here or selected I can set the line width of the stroke that's going to go around the outside of our letters and I can also click this drop down here and change the style I'm not going to get too much into that right now but the stroke that's going to be created is going to be whatever your colorist sets you here your foreground color so if I click on this and change this to black for example it should stroke our text with that black color now so I'll hit stroke and if I hide this path you'll see now our text has a stroke going around it and if I come back over here to my layers panel the text outline layer is the layer that took on that stroke so if I hide that now you can no longer see it and that just gives us some options there so that's just one example of what you can do with the path from text option and I'm just going to delete that text outline layer now and then I'm gonna click on my text box layer right click again so the next option here is text along path so a good example of when you want to use this option is when you draw a curve with the path tool and then you want to put your text on that curve so let me come over here and grab my Ken Brewer path tool and this is named after our Diamond patreon supporter camp brewer so let's say I click over here and then I click over here to create two nodes and then I'll create a curve so this is creating a curved path and I have an entire tutorial on the path tool to definitely check that out if you want to learn more about how to use the path tool but now if I come over here to our pass layer you'll see this is our curved path and we can just name this curved path hit enter and I can unhide this path now and let me grab my text tool so we have this curve path if I click on my text and then I right-click and I go to text along path you'll see now our text has been redrawn as a path and it's going along this curve here and if I wanted to make this text white text again I can come over here create a new layer and we'll name this curved text click OK we can come back over to our paths tool and if I click on this path you'll see all the nodes that are created we don't need to get into that right now but what I can do is I can change the foreground color to white click OK and then just come over here and click fill path and choose solid color as my option this is going to use our foreground color here click fill and now that curved text has been filled in with that white so I can grab a different tool to get rid of all those nodes there I can also come over to my past dialog and hide that path and also hide the curved path and now that's our final text drawn on a curved path I'm going to come back over here to my layers panel and I'm just going to delete this curved text layer and I'm gonna grab my text tool again and click on my text box and right click to bring up that text context menu so you'll see the next options here all have to do with the orientation of your text so right now this is set from left to right and that is just standard Western writing you can also do right-to-left if you're typing in a language such as I think Arabic types right-to-left so if you're typing in a language that types right-to-left I'll hit my Enter key and let me hit the justify to the left option so even though I have this justified to the left you'll see our text is still coming over here from the right and if I type tutorials that text again is coming from over here because we do have that option set here so the justify option will be the opposite when you have this set to right-to-left and of course if you click the center justify option it'll still just Center this in the image so I'll right click on here you'll see there are 4 other orientation options and they're all verticals so vertical text is a feature that was added in 2.10 so these are all just different you've got right-to-left mixed orientation right to left upright orientation and then you have those same two options but left to right these just have to do with how the words or the individual letters are orientated when this is vertical text so if I click on that first option here it's almost just like rotating that text 90 degrees so let me grab my move tool and just move this over here so now our text is vertically written but the individual characters themselves are orientated so that they're turned 90 degrees so it's just like writing again with the text box rotated I'm gonna grab my text tool again right click on here the next option is right to left with upright orientation so this is going to create upright letters here and I believe this is common in Eastern languages so there's some languages where you're gonna write vertically and then if I right click on here the other two options are again the same thing except you're typing left to right instead of right-to-left so that's what those two options do I'm gonna right click on here and go to left-to-right again that's just gonna reset this back to the standard text orientation grabbing my text tool again clicking on our text box and right clicking the last option here is input methods this option allows you to change the language inputs of your keyboard so this is more so important for people who type in another language other than English all right so that's it for the text context menu a couple other I want to point out here for one the layers menu option here has a couple text options so you've got discard text information and what that's going to do is it's going to convert your text layer just to a normal layer so when I click on that you'll see our text layer here in the layers panel is now just a regular layer this can be useful if you want to treat your text like a graphic the only problem with it is that right now with my text selected if I try to click on this text and edit it again it's not going to recover any of that text information so that text information will be gone so let me just hit control Z to undo that and then the other two options in here are to text a path and text a long path which we just went over a little bit earlier so I'm not going to go over that again so speaking of that discarded text information something important to know about that so let's say you have your text here and let me actually delete the second line of text so we just have the one line and then I'm just going to align this to the center of our image so we've been working this whole time with text layers which has allowed us to come in here at any point with the text tool and edit our text which involves changing the size of the text change in the font of the text the color etc but you can also add effects to your text using a variety of filters found in the issue with that is that anytime you apply an effect to a text layer it's going to convert that text layer to a normal layer so it is going to in a way discard that text information so let me demonstrate that for a second so I'm going to come over here to my filters go to light and shadow and then drop shadow so this is going to add a drop shadow to our text I can adjust how far the offset is of the shadow so I don't want the offset to be too high so I'm going to turn it down a bit I can also adjust the opacity of this so I can make it a little bit darker by increasing the opacity or a little bit lighter by decreasing it so go with the bout right there and I'll click OK so now our text has this drop shadow on it but if I come over here my text layer is now gone and this is converted to a normal layer you can actually bring that text information back and re-edit this text if you really need to you can come over here to your text tool and when you click on this text that now is a regular layer that has effects on it you're going to get this box that pops up that says confirm text editing and basically what this is saying is that in order to edit your text you have to discard any of the that you've applied to this text now that has caused it to convert to a regular layer or you can create a brand new text layer altogether which is just going to basically duplicate your original text onto a new text layer so let me just demonstrate that real quick so if I click create new layer now we have our text layer back again and it doesn't have any of the effects on it so if I hide my layer that had the drop shadow on it you'll see this text no longer has that drop shadow and now I can come back here with my text tool and re-edit this text so let's say maybe I want to change the color of this font - maybe that purple there I'll just go with this purple and I'll unhide that text layer so that text layer below is still there and you can kind of see it creeping through there you see some of the white creeping through so that's one of the downsides of that option so let me just delete that text layer there and I'm gonna start over so I'll grab my text tool make sure I'm clicked on this Daviess media design layer click on this and our other option is to click Edit so when I click Edit it's going to get rid of all of my drop shadow that I put on there so all the effects I have on this layer so click Edit and now that drop shadow is gone and it's not on a duplicated layer it's just reverted this text layer back to its original state and once again I can come in here and edit this change the color of the size the font whatever so I'll hit control Z to undo that that'll bring up my effects again one important thing to note is that your effects are going to be cut off by the layer boundry size so right now the size of our layer that this text is on is denoted by the black and yellow outline here so if i zoom in here the shadow that we added here is being cut off by this layer right here so one way we can prevent that is we can increase the size of our layer boundry so if i hold ctrl and zoom out with my mouse wheel click on this layer to convert it back to a regular text layer and then go to layer layer boundry size I can always increase the width and height of my layer boundry so here you'll see how much this is increasing if I hit the center option it'll Center that within our new layer width and I can also increase this so let's say I want to increase the height to 500 so now that gives us a lot more room below and I'll hit resize so there is our new layer boundry size so now if I go to filters light and shadow Shadow the drop shadow no longer gets cut off by the layer boundry there and I'll just click OK you can also just make the layer boundry the same size as your composition by going to layer layer the image size and now the size of our layer with the text on it is the same size as our composition alright so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you guys enjoyed it if you did please subscribe to my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design you can visit our website at Davies media design com you can enroll in our best-selling photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher on udemy Annie could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 167,352

Rating: 4.7310443 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2018, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, Text Tool, GIMP Text, Typing in GIMP, Text in GIMP, Text Basics GIMP, GIMP 2018, GIMP 2.10.8, Text Toolbox, Text Tool Options, Text Effects

Id: DVwzplbCiv8

Length: 31min 10sec (1870 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 12 2018