image out of text | Illustrations of Tina and Mr. Bee

« b to the m to the delish my paradise »

image out of text | May 27, 2007

Sometimes, you want to take a break from painting and use the magic of language and words to create a great storytelling piece. For this tutorial we’ll use three levels of contrast in black and white (highlight, mid light, and shadow) and place paragraphs into these three levels to create depth using only text.

A pretty good level of expertise in Adobe Photoshop (CS or higher)
A high res. image with a good range of contrast
A large piece of text
A high res. texture image

Let’s open our high contrast image in Photoshop.

Have your layers pallet open, always. Drag the high contrast image onto the Create a new layer button. Now, disable layer visibility (the eye icon) on the bottom layer. We do this as a safety measure, in case something screws up.

Back on to top layer, click Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer.

Check Monochrome, if needed adjust the numbers till you have strong highlights and shadows, click OK. Now, add a new layer on top of everything, use a color fill on this layer. Also, drag a texture image onto your current file to create another layer.

We’re going to disable the visibility of the last two layers we added and save these for later. Find the large amount of text you are going to use, delete any excess spaces or returns, and Copy it.

Back in Photoshop, use the Text tool and drag a box around your whole image, Paste, paste again and again until your whole image is covered in text. I used a simple sans serif typeface at a small font size, set the font color as Black.

Duplicate this text layer, set the newly created layer’s text to a middle tone gray.

Duplicate the text layer again and set this third text layer to a light gray color text.

Rasterize the three text layers (select the layer, go to Select > Rasterize > Type).

Disable visibility to the three text layers and select the black and white image layer.

Click on Select > Color Range, when on the Color Range pallet, click Select: Shadows and hit OK.

Immediately, click Select > Inverse (or CTRL+Shift+I).

On your layers pallet, click the black color text layer and turn on visibility on this layer, which should be the third layer from the top.

Hit Delete on your keyboard.

Click Select > Deselect (or CTRL+D).

Disable visibility on the text layer again.

Click back onto the black and white image. Click on Select > Color Range, then Select: Midtones, and hit OK.

Select > Inverse again.

Click on the middle tone gray text layer (second layer from the top), turn on visibility on this layer, hit Delete on your keyboard.

Deselect again, and disable visibility on the text layer again.

Once more, click on the black and white image layer, Select > Color Range, Select: Highlights.

Select > Inverse, click on the top text layer with the lightest gray text, turn on visibility, hit Delete.

Select > Deselect. Now, turn on visibility on all three text layers, the texture layer, and the color layer and turn off visibility on the black and white image layer.

We are almost done, now for some slight adjustments to add more contrast.

On the top text layer set the Layer Blending Properties to Screen, this will lighten that text layer. If needed, make a copy of this top text layer by dragging it to the Create a new layer button, this would lighten the layer even more.

If the middle tone gray text layer or the black text layer need more contrast, also make copies of these layers to finish the job. You can now flatten your image and save.