GIMP Text Along a Path {2.10.22}

hello and welcome to today's text effects tutorial my name is chris parker and i have another awesome tutorial for you so check this out today i want to show you how to add text on a curved path with the most recent version of when you're done you'll know how to add text to a path and more so are you ready to master this text effect awesome let's do it [Music] all right let's start off by creating a new document with command or control and the letter n or go up to file and select new from here for the size i'm going to do 1920 for the width 1080 for the height we're going to click on advanced here because i want to make sure that my resolution is set to 300. now if i'm working on a project that is going to be used only for online use which requires a resolution of 72 i'm still going to use 300 for the resolution when i'm working with graphics or text and that's because is a pixel based software and it's not going to render that text crisp and clear at a lower resolution because unlike photoshop it cannot render vector files or graphics because is only pixel based so my recommendation is 300 resolution anytime you're adding text if you want that text to be crisp and clean all right i'm going to go ahead and click ok now the background layer here is white for me for you it may be different that's fine because we're going to do something a little bit more different or creative other than a solid color so here i created a gradient from one color to another so let me show you how i did that first let's pick out our color so i'm going to click on our color swatches here the first one is the foreground color which is set to black right now for me yours again may be different so from here i'm going to choose a light blue color if you want to use the same color here's the hexadecimal number for that just type in this right here now i can change my background color as well without leaving this panel by clicking on the background swatch right here so for this one i'm going to choose a darker blue color so maybe something like that here's the hexadecimal number for that now that i have that all i have to do is come over here to my toolbar and select my gradient tool which is grouped together with the bucket fill tool now if your tools are not grouped together like this i recommend updating to the latest version of for this feature it's worth it just for this alone because it cleans up the interface it's not as busy because you don't have 30 plus different tool icons in this panel right here they're grouped together by similar types of tools and you can also adjust this panel so it looks more like photoshop and condensed like that for now i'll leave it like that and i will select the gradient tool the only problem is when i go to select it that menu disappears so click and hold down your left mouse button and that menu will stay open you can either grab the tool from here or use the keyboard shortcut which is the letter g all right now that i have my gradient tool selected we have a couple of different things that we need to set up in our tool options and the gradient panel so i have my gradient panel already over here if you don't have this option go to windows dockable dialogs and select gradients from down here once you have that panel open you want to come down here and select foreground to background rgb if you have this one selected it's going to be a hard edge transition from one color to the other here it will be a smooth color transition from one to the other so is going to take your foreground color and fill in different colors that are darker than it until it gets to that dark background color now down here in the tool options we want to make sure we have radio selected so go ahead click on this menu and select radio now i can come over here and click and drag out the gradient so it's automatically being applied but it's not set yet until you hit enter or return so it's giving you some options here to customize this gradient before you commit to the gradient so you can adjust the feathering from light to dark by making it longer or shorter by clicking on this outer point here and adjusting that line shorter or longer you can also change the feathering or the transition from one color to the other to be softer or harder by going to the center line until you see that circle and circle click here and then when you drag it out this way that feathering you can see is much harder from one color to the other so i'm gonna go ahead and move this back close to the original position which was 50 which we can see up here now that i've made these adjustments here if i click enter or return it will then disappear now the only problem is i want to place that gradient directly in the center so that the light color is in the middle versus off center right now so i need to add a couple of guides to help me visually see where the center is versus trying to eyeball it so we're going to add a couple of guides by going up to image guides new guide and by default horizontal is selected 50 is the default which is what we want when we click ok we should see a gradient but we don't and that's because i have it turned off so we're going to go up here to view and select show guides and that shows the horizontal one let's go back up to image guides and select vertical all right so that's dead center now i can click and drag out a new gradient and it will automatically replace the other one so something like that looks pretty good if i want to make adjustments to this again i can and the other thing is i can change the colors from dart to light versus light to dark by clicking on this icon right here which is going to reverse it i don't want to do that so i'm going to put it back but when i click enter or return this time it's adjusting the reverse and we can see these little dotted lines around the icon it's activating this tool option and every time you hit enter return it's just going to continue doing that so you have to click on this little icon right here to close that out click on this endpoint again and then click enter or return to deactivate that tool it's kind of a pain but that's what you have to do to get around that all right let's hide these guides i don't need to see them anymore and now let's add our text so i'm going to grab my text tool and i'm going to come over here and set up my settings for that text that i want to add so i'm going to use this font matsurat heavy you can use any font you want the size is going to be 100 then for the color i'm going to choose a bright yellow color so maybe something like that now i can come over here and begin typing what i want to add for that path so let's do how to add a how to add text along a path all right that'll work so i'm going to hit my escape key to get out of that tool i'm going to grab my move tool here or with the keyboard shortcut which is the letter m i just want it out of the way because i don't want to have my path go over the top of this text layer because it's going to make things a little bit harder when we go to add it to that path all right let's grab our path tool right here and click one time and get this little anchor point now to create the path you need to create another anchor point so i'm going to click and hold down my left mouse button to get that line from left to right now the reason why i'm holding down my mouse button is because i want to bend that line so if i drag my mouse over to the right here we can see two handles here that allow us to bend that line once i release i have a nice little curve and i'm going to start over here again to add another one so click hold and drag to bend the line and then maybe right here again all right that looks pretty good now we can begin applying the text along the path first we need to right click on our text layer and select text along a path now we have all these circles over our text and we can't read the text but the text hasn't been placed on the line yet we still have a couple more steps now these little circles in case you're wondering if you click on it and drag it you're actually reshaping that character we don't want to do that at least for this project so command or control and the letter z to undo that so now in order to apply the text along the path we need to fill it in with pixels or color now remember i said previously in the beginning that is pixel-based software well we need to fill it in with colors or pixels in order to apply that text along the path so to do that the first thing we need to do is we need to select the path that we created or at least apply the selection to the letters of that path because if we go to our paths panel right here we can see our path right here now if you're not seeing this paths panel come up to windows dockable dialogs and select paths from here so this first one right here we can't see if i turn it on and select we can see this red outline so that's the path if i go back and select this one that's the path of each letter that's going to be applied along the original path so we want to turn it on as well so we can see it so just click on this first square right here all right now we need to click on this icon here to create a new layer let's call it text path and make sure it's set to transparency and click ok now we need to make a selection of that path easy to do just click on selection from path now we can see those dancing ants that represent that content being selected let's go grab our bucket fill tool circles disappear and we're left with the selection and the outline of the path i'm going to use the same color that i use for the text up here and i'm just going to click inside one of the selections and it automatically fills it in two more quick steps let's go back to our paths panel so we can turn off that path so it's not visible and then let's deselect our text select none and there you have it how cool is that

Channel: Parker Photographic

Views: 7,895

Keywords: gimp text along a path, gimp text along path, gimp text effects tutorial, gimp text effects, gimp text effects curve, gimp cool text effects, how to create text on a path in GIMP, GIMP text on a path, gimp text, text on a path with gimp

Id: 0CMt3Uc0zrg

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020