Tutorial: Two Toned Text with Photoshop

This tutorial is written with Photoshop but the principles are super easy to use in most graphics programs.
Level: Easy!

Particularly at present, with the trend to use lots of different papers on a page, one is often faced with the problem of getting text of one colour to show up as in this example:

And of course you don’t want to have to type every title in black LOL! This tutorial will show you how to solve the problem very elegantly!

Step 1
Set up your title as you would like it to end up with regards to fonts and size (not so much colour at this stage) – it is important that you do this as you will be making changes which will be difficult to undo. In the example above it is still possible to see Elizabeth’s name clearly enough, however, were it say black and white at this stage I’d use, maybe, a grey so as to be able to see the end result.
Once you are happy with font and size, change the colour of the text to that which shows up best on the darker paper, in this case I will stay with white.
One little tip here – it will usually end up looking best if no one character is over the join (eg I don’t want to end up with half a white, half a denim blue “z”, which I would if Elizabeth was slightly further to the left.) That said it can be very attractive to do the initial letter, in my case the “E” in a large, maybe fancy, font and have that being half and half.

Step 2.
Duplicate the text layer (Photoshop Ctrl+J) and change the colour of the font to what you’d like on the lighter paper – in my example I’ll change to denim blue.

As you can see, part of Elizabeth disappears…….

Step 3:
Click on the top layer of text, right click > Rasterize Layer (now you see why it was important to get this right in the beginning?

Step 4:

Using you Marquee tool to select the section of the top layer which you would like to appear white (in my example “Eli”) and hit delete……….. ta da…….. you have a lovely title, easily read against the deep and light colours!

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and find lots of uses for it – what works for fonts will work for all sorts of other things, like brushes…… let your imagination run free!

Credits:
Papers are from my “Forget-Me-Not” Page kit
Font is DSP Pollyanna by Suzanne C Walker, here at DSP.