Making Your Own Titles

I love digital scrapbook alphas but sometimes I want a quicker way to make a title on my page. On the page below I have two titles. Today I'm going to show you how I made the cloisonne title. I'll show you how I made the lunch title in a later blog post.

Just a note: I'm working in Photoshop CS3. I believe most of the things I'm doing here are achievable in photoshop elements.

2 in 1 Templates 
Chinese Takeout by mle Card
Krafty Papers by Happy Scrap Girl

Step 1: Type out your title and pick a font that you like. Preferably one that is a little thicker. I used Sail for my font.

Step 2: Put a digital paper on top of your text layer and clip it to your title. Ctrl+alt+G for Photoshop and Ctrl+G for Elements.

Step 3: Go to your your layer palette and double click on your text layer. Your layer style box should pop up. From there you can play with your shadow and inner shadow settings.

These are the settings I used for my title:

My Drop Shadow - Pretty much a normal shadow.

The Inner Shadow - Make sure you play with the blend mode. I chose Hard Mix for this particular title.

Adding an inner shadow is just one way to make a custom title.

There's another way I like to use as well and it's by adding a stroke. You can see how I did that on the title below.

This template will be releasing tomorrow!
Great Escape by WMSquared
Leavin' On a Jet Plane by  Laura Banasiak and Jenn Barrette

Use the same steps as above but instead of adding an inner shadow, play with the stroke style instead. On this page, I used Pacifico as my font.

Here are my stroke settings. 

Play around with all of the different settings until you get your desired look. Make sure you have that Preview Button checked so that you can see the changes to your title as you are playing with the settings. You can also change the color of the stroke by clicking on the color box.

These are some of my favorite ways to make my own custom titles. I also like to apply styles to my text but I'll save that tutorial for another day. Hope this helps adding a title to your page a little bit easier.

-Liz