Text-made Image

Every day we see a lot of text. Various documents, advertisements, prospects all have become part of our everyday life. But what if you create a picture from a text? Few recall that earlier we had ASCII graphics - that we in fact created pictures from texts in text editors. Now I will describe an easy way to make a picture text in Photoshop.



Let’s begin by opening a picture in Photoshop that you want to see in text format. I used this one:

Desaturate the image (Ctrl+Shift+U), then Add layer mask (Layer>Add Layer Mask>Reveal All). Select all (Ctrl+A), copy selection (Ctcl+C). Then go to Channels (Window>Channels). Select Layer1 mask and make it visible. Then paste (Ctrl+V) and deselect (Ctrl+D).

Go back to Layers (Window>Layers), select Layer Thumbnail and fill everything with white.

Create new layer (Ctrl+Shift+N), fill it with white and bring it to Back (Ctrl+Shift+[). Now select Text tool and highlight the entire canvas area. Then copy text from any source and insert it in the highlighted area. I used the standard filler text, “Lorem Ipsum Dolar Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.”

Apply the following settings to the text:

You should come up with something like this:

For a really convincing effect you can simply duplicate the layer with text (Ctrl+J). Also, you can choose the layer with solid white color (without mask) and fill it easily with shades of grey (#e0e0e0). Although this would be cheating, inasmuch as the image is easily painted with its original colos, but at the same time this increases the quality and is not terribly noticeable.

Here’s what I came up with as a result: