{Photography Editing} How To Add A Faded Text Bar To Pictures

So, I may be the only person who is not on vacation or is not at BlogHer but I do know that one of my readers is wondering how to make a faded text box or text bar to their photos. Michelle this one is for you!

These light backgrounds are used by many bloggers to put a label on their photos. Labeled photos are great for Pinning because anyone that is browsing on Pinterest can look at the photo and know that the blog post is about. If you are not a blogger, you can use this technique when editing pictures of your kids or even to make photo cards. Since I’ve got back to school on my mind, I used a photo from a tutorial I posted last year for a Backpack ID Tag after making this tutorial, I realized that it probably isn’t the best picture to show a faded text box because with the plain background it just looks like I added a gray box. But I didn’t feel like redoing the how thing so here goes…

When I want to make a text box I use PicMonkey because they have a rectangle sticker and Pixlr does not. I’m not sure why Pixlr doesn’t have basic shapes stickers yet. Anyway, go to PicMonkey.com and click on Edit A Photo.

Find the picture you want and open it. Then, click on Overlays from the far left toolbar. It is the button that has a heart, a burst and a speech bubble.

Next, click on Geometric in the second toolbar on the left.

Choose the rectangle and a black rectangle will show up in the middle of your image. Since my background is black, I slid the color slider, in the Overlay toolbox on the right, up to white.

Then, I dragged the white rectangle to the bottom of the image. I placed my cursor on top of the edge of the rectangle, a double arrow symbol showed and I made the box shorter with the horizontal edge and wider with the vertical edge. Does that make sense? Just play around with it until the box is the size you want it to be.

Once the rectangle is the size you want it to be and in the place you want it, move the Fade slider, from the Overlay toolbox on the right, to the right. This will make the color fade away and make the rectangle more transparent. Adjust the Fade to where you want it to be.

Now that you’ve got the faded text box, go ahead and add your text. Remember that your layers are not merged which is a good and bad thing. It is good because you want still move the rectangle to wherever you want but it is bad because I can be hard to grab the text layer to get it to the exact place you want it. This might sound complicated but it really isn’t. The best thing to do is just pick a picture and try messing around with it. There is an undo button at the top center of the page and you don’t have to save the image when you are done.

The text bar can be any color you want it to be. Instead of choosing white like I did, just choose the color from the Overlay toolbox on the right by sliding the dot to the color you want.

I hope you have a wonderful Thursday!

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Comments

April Decheine says:

August 2, 2012 at 2:06 pm

Thanks for the tips, I was getting errors on Pixlr yesterday, I am playing around with PicMonkey today!

Michelle says:

August 2, 2012 at 2:24 pm

It’s just that simple! Thank YOU so much!! I love PicMonkey and I’m glad I can use it to do this!!

Michelle Paige says:

August 2, 2012 at 4:56 pm

Here’s another ‘Michelle’ thanking you for your tutorial…thanks!

Betsy says:

August 2, 2012 at 4:56 pm

I am so glad that you did a post on this. I never knew how simple it was to add text. Thank You!

Katie Adams says:

August 2, 2012 at 5:46 pm

Great tutorial! I also have been wondering how to do that and I use picmonkey ALL THE TIME! Go figure! Thanks again!

Anne @ Domesblissity says:

August 3, 2012 at 11:40 am

I hope you add this one to your ebook!

Anne xx