Add Speech Balloons and Text Bubbles to Your Photos in Photoshop or Elements

By Sue Chastain, About.com Guide

A fun way to perk up your photos is by adding cartoon-style speech balloons. With traditional photos you can buy press-on stickers and add your own phrases to them with a felt tip pen, but that won't work for your digital photos unless you plan to print them out. Recently, a member of our discussion forum asked us how to create these text bubbles in Photoshop. I've put together these instructions along with a handy kit for adding speech balloons to your photos in Photoshop 6 or Photoshop Elements. You should be able to use this with later versions as well.

First you'll need to download the kit and load the shapes and layer style into Photoshop or Photoshop Elements according to the instructions below. The kit includes Speech Balloons.csh which contains several custom shapes so you don't have to draw your own from scratch. It also includes Speech Balloons.asl, a layer style that you may select when you draw a text balloon.
• Instructions for Photoshop
• Instructions for Photoshop Elements

Note: Photoshop Elements includes its own set of custom shapes called "Text Balloons" in Elements 1.0 and "Talk Bubbles" in Elements 2.0. You may wish to use these in addition to the custom shapes I've provided in the kit. To access them: Activate the the custom shape tool, then go to the shapes palette in the options bar and click the small arrow in the upper right hand corner of the shapes pallete. A menu will appear with several shape sets to choose from.

Previous

• Add Speech Bubbles to Your Photos - Download and Install the Presets
• Add Speech Bubbles to Your Photos - Find Some Comic Style Fonts
• Add Speech Bubbles to Your Photos - Setting Up Options
• Add Speech Bubbles to Your Photos - Drawing the Text Bubble Shape
• Add Speech Bubbles to Your Photos - Adding Text
• Add Speech Bubbles to Your Photos - Linking Text & Shape, Modifying the Style

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