In my opinion, journaling is one of the most important parts of scrapbooking. Whether it’s a few words, a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole page of text, getting words on the page is key.
In Photoshop Elements, it’s easy to add text to a page using the Text Tool. The Text Tool is the capital T button in the Tool Palette (or use the keyboard shortcut T to select it). There are several different tools nested together, but today we will only be looking at the Horizontal Text Tool.
Go ahead and create a new document, so that you can experiment with some of these text options. I’ll point out my favorite things as we go along.
With the Text Tool selected, click and drag across the document. This will create a Text Box. All of the text that you type will appear inside this box. First, type some text. With the Text Tool active, notice how you can resize/reshape this box which reshapes the lines of text without affecting the point size. If you see a small + in the lower right corner of your text box, this means that not all of your text is visible and you need to make your text box larger or your font smaller.
With the Text Tool selected, you will see a row of options at the top of the screen. This is how you change the font, text size, justification, etc. Most of these options look similar to the text options in other programs.
One thing that might be new to you is the Leading window. Leading is the space between lines of text.
Adjusting the leading will put more or less space between lines. For regular journaling, leaving the leading set to Auto is fine, but if you are using a script or handwritten font, you may need to adjust it manually. And if you want the lines of journaling to match up with a premade journaling tag, adjusting the leading is imperative.
Unadjusted Leading:
Adjusted Leading:
If you resize a Text Box when the Move Tool (keyboard shortcut V) is active rather than the Text Tool, you will notice that rather than changing how the lines of text flow within the text box, it resizes the text just like a picture or embellishment. Depending on how you pull on the sides and corners, the letters will become larger or smaller, stretched out, distorted, etc.
One more cool thing that the Text Tool can do is have lines of text flow in shapes or patterns. These are called Type Paths. The only problem is that when using Photoshop Elements, you can’t create Type Paths. Nevertheless, Scrap Girls
ScrapSimple products to the rescue! A Type Path can be a simple swirl or wave shape with a single line of text, or it can be a larger shape filled with line after line of text. Type Paths are really easy to use, and they add just a little something extra to your page. Literally, you just place the Type Path on your layout, use the Text Tool to highlight the filler text, press Delete, and type your own text. You can adjust the font, size, color, etc., just like with regular text.
In this layout, I used a Type Path to make the journaling follow the line of the { bracket. It emphasizes the interesting shape of the journaling tag.
PRODUCTS USED:(Click on the images below to be taken to their product page)
Article written by Anna Mansfield
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