burning text onto images

March 25, 2006 10:06 AM

I wanted to create a banner image for a blog and wanted to take a jpg image and 'burn' some text into it (using different typefaces) -- anyone know the best way to do this? I don't have photoshop -- is there any other way? (I own an ibook)
posted by dearleader to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

You could download a free trial of Photoshop and use it for 30 days. Once you have that, just use the tool marked with a large T on the toolbar and write where you want to on your image.
posted by visual mechanic at 10:24 AM on March 25, 2006

Forget a "free trial." Get The G.I.M.P for free. It will give you 99.9% of the things that Photoshop will and won't cost $800 if you want it past 90 days.
posted by slavlin at 10:29 AM on March 25, 2006

For the purpose of the poster's question, the effect can probably be achieved with the gimp. However:

If you intend to use it for more -- any avid photoshop user will tell you that the gimp, despite linux zealots claims otherwise, falls far short of photoshop.

Interface-wise, etc, it miserably fails comparison reviews. Of course it's free, though, so who can complain...
posted by twiggy at 10:50 AM on March 25, 2006

Well, there's that horrible BitTorrent, but we'd never advocate that here. No, never.

Alternatively, GimpShop is a best of both worlds solution.
posted by tommorris at 12:19 PM on March 25, 2006

Seeing that the poster is on an iBook, everyone here suggesting the GIMP should instead check out Seashore, an OSX Cocoa app based on the GIMP internals (for OS 10.3 or later). All the potential GIMP function, but with a nice OSX naitive interface, no mucking around with X11 needed. Simple, reasonably powerful, and still free..

tommorris, Gimpshop is great for those of us who have been using photoshop for years and get annoyed at the GIMP's non-photoshoppy UI, but for someone looking to make simple banner graphics (who doesn't seem to have much graphics experience) Gimpshop is probably about as intuitive as the GIMP.
posted by drumcorpse at 1:16 PM on March 25, 2006

here are some more detailed gimp instructions:

0. download and install the gimp.

1. open desired image, crop/scale to the appropriate size.
(file->open or file->new, then select the knife in the tools palette and select the desired area to crop.)

2. make a new layer for text. Layers palette->new layer (next to the little trashcan)

3. select white as the foreground color, and then the type tool, then type your letters in the new layer.

4. change the opacity of the type layer. the slider is right above the thumbnail of the layer in the layers palette. You may also want to change the layer mode from "normal" to something else- play around with it.
posted by wzcx at 1:22 PM on March 25, 2006

As long as you're running OSX 10.4, you can also use the freeware program LiveQuartz, which can definitely handle the text-on-JPEG work you need to do. As far as the "99.9% of Photoshop" comment about GIMP, well, the reality is that it's only actually about 45% of Photoshop, and for many of us, not the most important 45%. It's free, but you get what you pay for.
posted by dbiedny at 2:18 PM on March 25, 2006