How to put text behind a person in Adobe Photoshop CC

Hi there, in this video we are going to add some text behind this woman here. It's super quick, super easy, let's go learn how to do it in Photoshop. 

First up, in your 'Exercise Files', open up 'Quick Select 07'. So this particular trick is reasonably easy, because we can use the Quick Selection Tool, which we've learned in the previous video, but also because we're copying and pasting it not to another image where it can be quite obvious, we're placing it back on itself, and it's pretty forgiving. So, super quick and easy, which is nice. 

Grab your Quick Selection Tool. In terms the brush size, I'm going to go up to, you can see my brush size is going up, using my square brackets. Change it to about 50. I'm going to do a really rough pass so I'm just going to click, hold, and drag, try and get it up the middle of the legs. Here we go. Then into here, I'm just getting the bulk of it in then I'm going to go and tidy it up. I'll zoom in. It's looking okay. So now I'm just going to zoom in and just work out these parts here. Now what you'll find is that this image works reasonably well because everything's in focus, except for these shoes they're a bit of the pain part but there's still enough contrast in the background. 

If you're working on a separate image, and it's just never grabbing it, and you're just like, "What's wrong?" it's just, sometimes it just can't do it, see here, the gray of the shoe and the background here are very close. There is still enough contrast that I can keep clicking in here and get it, and if it goes too far I can come back out of it. Remember, holding down the 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC minuses. So if it goes out too far you can minus it back, like that. Just going to undo because I just ripped mine. 

So now I'm just going to kind of slowly work around it. You can speed up now because it's just a lot of this. And like I said, it's pretty forgiving, can you see, how this is-- the very-- the colors-- we humans know that the shoe ends there but the computer has to kind of try and read pixels and colors and they can't really see the difference. Again this is pretty forgiving, so I'm not worried anymore about that. It's good across the back, a little bit there. I'm going to minus off, so I'm holding 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC. Across here, I'm not worried too much about the hair in this case, we're going to look at a better technique for that later on. 

I'm holding on the 'Alt', just clicking in here, it's done a pretty good job across the nose. And I make a nice tiny brush, get in there. Wrong brush, hold down 'Alt', and click in there to remove the mask. This can be a little confusing when you're looking at negative selections, you're like, "Oh, man!" It's a bit of a brain bender, because I've got this selected, but also the background, so I want to get rid of it I'm going to use minus '-' to get rid of these holes here. Again, that is good enough for our little project. I'm going to zoom out, so I've got our good enough selection. 

The other thing to know is that if yours is, if it's out of focus, becomes very hard. If it's the same color as the background, very hard. She's wearing gray, like a light gray. Running gear, that would be tough. Also note that this image is quite large, so 'Image', 'Image size'. It is quite a few pixels across, like 5000. That's kind of typical of a good high-res image from a DSLR camera. If you've got one, it's only like-- check yours, if it's going badly, and it's only like 500 or a thousand it's just not a very big image, there's not a lot of detail in it for Photoshop to work out the edges. See if you can get a larger version of the image. If not, you just have to do your best and potentially look at some of the other masking techniques later in this class. 

All right, a lot of talking, I've cut a selection. What I want to do now is copy and paste it. So I'm going to go to 'Edit', 'Copy', and 'Edit', 'Paste'. The cool thing about what Photoshop does is that it pastes it back exactly where it got it. You'll see, now I have two layers so I've got this bottom layer, and now this top layer, both sitting on top. Now what we need to do is slide the image or the graphic, or the text, in our case in between these two layers. So I'm going to grab my 'Type Tool'. Click once, I use the word 'So'. Font that I'm using, I'm using Roboto, which is a free one, you can download online, the one that Google uses for YouTube. I'm using the Condensed one because I wanted a nice tall font to kind of poke out from behind. 

So I'm going to grab my 'Move Tool'. You can see now, not working. So it's all about the layer structure, grab 'Soul'. Click, hold, drag the word and you'll see this little blue line appear in between them. There you go. Now it's a matter of, with this layer selected, I'm going to use-- I could change my font size, but I'm going to use my shortcut which is 'Command T' on a Mac, 'Control T' on a PC. I'm just going to make it super big. I'm going to make it look like it's sitting on that line. Just happens to be a good kind of spot for it. That kind of interacts with the background, but you can still tell what the word is. That sometimes the hard bit, you have to pick a font and a size that makes the font actually legible and doesn't turn it into a strange word, or becomes illegible. That could be you. 

I'm going to do one last thing before I leave. With this layer, I'm going to add a bit of a gradient to make it try and match the background, I know it's fake but a little bit of background integration wouldn't go astray in this case. So I'm going to-- with the Soul layer, I'm going to go down to my 'fx' and I'm going to go to 'Gradient Overlay'. In here, it's remembered the last thing I did. So depending on what yours is set to, click on this color bar here anywhere. Now the first house, double click it. This bottom one here, I just went through and picked a gray. I'm dragging this around, and I drag it all over here and picked a kind of a darker gray. 

You can kind of see it adjusting in the background here. You can pick colors from the document which is actually probably a nicer thing to do, but I want a kind of a warmer color. Not quite that steely gray. Now I'm just messing about, click 'OK'. This top one here, I'm going to keep as white, you can use any color you like. Click 'OK', click 'OK'. You might play around with adding a Drop Shadow. That's ugly. '5', '5'. 'Angle'. I'm not going to, I'm just messing about now. I don't like the Drop Shadow at all, so I'm going to cancel that. I'd like you to go through, practice. I want you to use your own text. You can use Soul, it's fine, just send me your example. Maybe pick a different text, could be your name. And experiment with the Gradient and Drop Shadow. All right, let's get onto the next video.