Question about lettering

To anyone who can assist,

I normally do everything the old fashioned way. I pencil, ink and letter by hand. However, I have some pages penciled and inked and I still have to letter them. I would rather not do a cut and paste job.
How do you letter with Photoshop? I can set up the letters and make word balloons but I don't know how to get a black (out)line around the word balloons. Without that black line, the balloons just don't look right.
If anyone can help me out with this, I will be really appreciative! I'll even but you in my cool book!

You can do it in 3 ways:

1) If you are creating the speech bubble using the shapes method. Rasterize the layer then either double click on the layer and use the stroke option or go to Edit and choose stroke.

2) If you are using the paths method, click on the pen tool, go to the vector outline and and right-click and there you will see fill and stroke options.

3) If you are using the fill pixels method, go to Edit and select stroke.

Hope this helps.

Or you can, create the bubbles on a seperate layer, go to layer > layer style and add an "outline" to it (choose color and thickness). All shapes on the that are surrounded by transparant space will now receive an outline).

Or you could (what I do) create the voice bubbles on one layer and create a layer underneath it. Then Ctrl-click in the layer panel on the layer that has the bubbles, to select them all. Then go to select > modify > expand, and expand it a few pixels depending on the resolution and image size you use. Then fill the new selection with the colour of your outline (usually black) Now Ctrl-click the upper layer again, and hit delete (to get rid of the center area of the black) You're left with an outline on the lower layer. now you can lower the opacity of the upper layer to create a see-through voice bubble, which looks even cooler.

Cool tips Scavenger.

Thanks guys, I am going to try lettering this week. I'll let you know how it goes!

Photoshop is mostly raster based so i'm guessing you'll be drawing the bubbles with the elliptical marquee tool and filling them in with white.

The way i would go about it is drawing the bubble, then going to 'Blending Options" then adding a stroke, then make a new layer on top for the text.

A little universal rule of thumb for text in comics is always have capital letters, but i'm sure you got that already

EcEu said:

A little universal rule of thumb for text in comics is always have capital letters, but i'm sure you got that already

Click to expand...

Yep, yep.
I have hand lettered issues 1 and 2 by hand so far. I have a third issue (a seperate comic book) to put out but it is already penciled and inked. If I can manage to letter it in Photoshop, then I have a quick issue I can bang out (since the "hard work" is already done).