Photo Techniques - Adding Words to Photos

Sometimes we take photos of the people & animals we love that are incredible photos. They are perfectly clear, the lighting is fantastic, brilliant colour, everything is just so... except for that one big patch of background "blankness" that we just can't crop out of the photo without lessening the impact of the photo as a whole.
Don't disparage you do have options.

1. Get over it and just live with it as it is.
2. Disguise it somehow.

Sometimes I choose option 1 when nothing else I try works. It doesn't mean I have failed as a scrapper, it just means for the time being I am allowing it to be seen as it is - it doesn't mean I won't change my mind... it just is what it is.

If I go with option 2, I have a number of techniques at my disposal with which to disguise the big blank blob (from hell).

1. Hide it with rub-ons - for more on this see my earlier blog post.
2. Cover it with a decorative element or embellishment.
3. Cover it partially through the use of layering materials such as other photos, journaling, titles etc over it.
4. Disguise it using journaling or a title directly onto your photo using your photo software - in my case PHOTOSCAPE.

Whatever you favourite photo software is, it should be able to do something similar one way or another.

1. Open Photoscape
2. Select Editor
3. Open the photo you want to add the title or journaling to
4. Select the object tab
5. Select the text tool - this brings up a pop-up menu
6. Type in your journaling or title. You will see the text box automatically increases in size to accommodate the amount of typing you have entered.
7. Once you have keyed in what you want to include you can then start to alter the appearance. Try changing the colour of the font, adding a shadow, change the font size or font style until you get a look you are happy with.
8. Click OK to finishing editing the text box. This closes the pop-up box, though you can re-open it at any stage by double clicking on the text box.
9. Now move your text box to where you want to add it. You can at this stage resize the box to fit the available space and even alter the angle of the text box for added interest.
10. Once you are happy with the new look, save your photo to a new file name. Remember don't save over the top of your original photo... just in case!!!
11. Then you can print out your photo as you would normally print your photos and scrapbook.

Here are some before and after pictures...

This was just a sample to show the difference so I don't have a layout with picture... yet, but here are some examples of layouts.

With "Air Jordan" I kept the background as the original background - sky in this case. However in the picture below, I wanted to remove some of the background distraction (sorry Aunty Jean) so added a small heart onto which I then added the text block and this time changed the angle of the text box so the words would align with the heart frame.