Hello and welcome to this series of videos on the Gimp. In this video, we're gonna be touching on the Text tool and you can get to all the options here for the Text tool by clicking on this icon in our toolbox which is probably this just or hit the letter T as in Tom on your keyboard. Now one thing I wanted to point out here is I've added a couple of extra Speed tools for like a better phrase to my toolbox here. And you can do this because their basically their default set or you can either tick on or tick off and how I had them added here is by going up to file, preferences and this is how you can setup different items within your Gimp software.

And if you happen to screw something up in amongst here, just go to the reset button and that will fix it all up for you just like it came out of the box brand new. Speaking of box, we go here to the toolbox and just tick or untick the items that you want and your toolbox speed tools or what I call and we're good to go. So click on OK and we're out of here. Now then, just going to touch on some of the items here in our Options box for the Text tool is the Font and this is the list of all the fonts available on your system. So pick one that you're happy with and that's the text font style that will show up on the image you're going to be adding text to. And this gives us a little description of what that font is and here you can increase or decrease the size of the text by this up or down arrows or just by highlighting and putting in whatever number you're wanting. And over here I would just leave this as Pix or PX rather and that stands for Pixels. Or if for some odd reason you wanted to change that to inches, millimeters, points, picas, or more then you've got those options here as available.

These three items here I've never messed with. They're basically fine-tuning points to the point of something that I've no need for but they're basically fine-tuning for like smoothing the edges of the text that you're entering on to your image. Possibly if you're gonna be using humongous sized text like 50, or 60, or 70 pixels then this might come into play but I don't so I won't so if you find the need go ahead and play around with them until you're happy with them but I would just leave them alone. In so far as me using this for creating header, graphics or footer graphics, or EBook covers, or video cover type graphics this works fine for me so I'll just leave that alone. Now of course you can change the color by clicking on this and it brings up your Text Color chooser and you got several options up here you can use to change the color of the text and whenever you're happy with the color then just click on OK and it changes the color of the text here. Now if you notice it also change it here and here. What I do instead of this is I just go over here in my color dialog box and make the decision on what color text I want. And as you can see as I'm choosing it, it makes changes both in the foreground color here as well as the text color here and so on. Now another way is right here is the foreground and here's the background color.

You can alternate this by just clicking on this arrow here and then those are back and forth. As you watch this here, you can see it changes that as well. So well that's that. Again, I don't mess with these too because if I want to move my text from this justified to the left, to the center, to the right and filled. If I want to do that then I'll just use the Move tool. But that's just how I roll. Anyway, this is the indentation of the first line and you may find a need for that and if so you can adjust the amount of indentation by using these buttons here. And these increases or decreases the space between the lines of your text and also between the text themselves, the characters themselves. Now these guys here they are not highlighted. These are pretty cool tools that allow you to transform, deform, or however you want to put it the text you're putting on your image. Once you start typing your text or you've entered the text onto the image then these guys will become active and what they will do is similar to this Bezier or Paths tool up here, that's name Path down here, is it provides you with handles and you just grab those handles and pull out them or move them around and it transforms, deforms, or warps whatever you call it the text that you're working with that that time. So again that's gonna come in handy you know as far as playing around with different text styles. But let's go ahead and open up an image and start playing around with it ourselves and add some text. Let me see here.  Let's go to one that I've already played with here before and this is a header image. And if you notice it says PSD extension which means it's a Photoshop image. One of the cool things about the Gimp besides the fact that it's free is that you are able to manipulate, or alter, change, work with the Photoshop images without having to spend three to six hundred bucks for the Photoshop software. As you can see over here are the different layers that make up this header image.

And just to demonstrate, you can just click on the eyeball there to disengage that image and they go away. And alternately, you can click on it and make them come back. So that being said, let's go ahead and add some text. Now once you've got the text chosen or the way the style setup here the way you want it to appear on your image then you just click anywhere on your image and you've got some options here. Well the text editor pops up and you can either go to open the file and if you got some text stashed away somewhere like say for example the copyright information. The Gimp people have told me that if you hit the Alt key and something on your numbers pad on your keyboard that it will open up the selection of the special characters. Like for example, the TM for the trademark or the C within the circle for the copyright emblem. I can't get that to work for me so what I've done instead is I will type that information out on a word document or text document, save it and this is one way you can get to that information. You can open the file up here, highlight it, copy it, and then just paste it in here. And then you just close this or you can hit the Clear and that will eliminate, or delete, or clear the text that you've already put in the text editor.

And the LTR and RTL is simply the direction that the text is being entered from left to right or from right to left. Mainly English and this is some of your pin languages like Arabic for example. Let's go ahead and type in some text, Freehand, and then we can click on close and there we have it. Once the text is in here, you can go to some of the other tools we've touched on before. Like for example, the Move tool. And once I click on this icon, I wanna make sure that this radio button here is ticked, the "Move the Active Layer" because otherwise if this was ticked it will still work but you gotta play around with it and sometimes you have a tendency of grabbing the wrong layer even though the mouse is right over this character here. So have that one ticked that way the active layer being the hand here or the freehand, the one you just made, is picked and we can just move this guy around anywhere we want. And if we want to rotate it, we rotate it any way we want. There we have that. Let's try this Perspective. And again, you can just play around with things that way and that's pretty much the Text tool and some of the different ways you can play around with it; increasing the size. And again don't forget that you can copy and paste from other documents the text that you want to enter into your image here the once you're done you can go here to File, Save As, and you can save it as a PSD or a Photoshop file.

But here's what you wanna do. You go down here to the plus sign and this is how you decide what you want to save it as. Gimp, you can save it as this extension, the XCF and this is kind of a generic extension where you can save it. You can open it up in Gimp, you can open this up in Photoshop but this is what I typically do is I'll just save it in whatever format that I open it up then. So if I opened up a PSD, I'll save it in PSD. Let's go down here and find our PSD and then click on Save. And of course where you're gonna be saving it at. You just hit the plus or minus key down here to select the file type and hit Save. That's it folks. Thank you very much for watching this video. I hope you learned something and have fun entering text to your image.