How To Place Text Behind Anything In Photoshop

In this video, I'm going to show you how to place text behind anything in Photoshop. Hi, welcome back to the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com. I'm Jesus Ramirez. In this video, I'm going to show you how to place text behind any object or person in Photoshop. This is an effect often seen in magazines and movie posters, and I'm going to show you how to easily recreate this effect on your photos using non-destructive techniques. It's going to be a straightforward tutorial, but it will have a whole lot of tips and tricks that you'll be able to use in many other projects. Okay, let's get started. This is the image that we're going to work with, and we're simply going to place text right behind the model. And the first thing that you want to do is click on the horizontal type tool and just type any word that you like. The font is not important, but I am using Gotham Light. I'm going to type the word behind. Notice that the word is a little too small, so I can increase the size by doing two things, using this dropdown and adjusting the size, or I can simply commit the text and then press Ctrl T, Command T on the Mac, and scale it like I would scale any other layer. So I'm going to hold Shift to constrain the proportions and drag from a corner handle and just make that text larger. And I can just place it anywhere that I like, and I actually want this to be all caps, so what I'll do is I'll click on the character panel, and from the character panel, I'm going to click on the all caps icon. There it is. And I'm going to show you a quick trick to center objects in a canvas. So whenever you want to center any layer onto the canvas, you can press Ctrl A, Command A on the Mac, to make a selection around the entire canvas, then select the move tool, and in the options bar, you can click on the align icons, on the align vertical centers, and on the align horizontal centers, and that will place your text in the center of the canvas. I'm going to press Ctrl D, Command D to deselect, so that the selection is no longer active, and I can just hold Shift, click, and drag up and down to keep the text constrained. So I'm going to place the text right about here. Now that I have the text exactly where I want it, I'm going to disable the layer by clicking on the eye icon, and now I'm going to work on the selection that is going to allow me to create a mask to hide the text. So with the image layer active, I'm going to select the quick selection tool. If you're on Photoshop CS6 or older, you're going to have to click and drag across the model until you select her. However, if you're in Photoshop CC, then there's a tool that can help you get started quicker. Notice that with the quick selection tool active, I have this button here, select subject. If I click on that, Photoshop is going to use Adobe's artificial intelligence, Adobe Sensei, to make a selection out of what it thinks is the main subject of the photo. In this case, it does a really good job. There's only a couple areas that we need to fix. Select subject will not give you a 100% perfect selection, but I still think it's worth using it because it saves you time. It gets you jump started in the selection process. Also, since this tool is using artificial intelligence, I think that in future releases of Photoshop, select subject will be much better. But anyway, in this case, it does a fairly good job. There's only a couple areas that we need to fix. So I'm going to hold Alt, Option on the Mac, and subtract from the selection on these areas here. And I'm going to add these areas to the selection. You don't need a precise selection. As long as you're close enough, you should be fine. Once you're done making your selection, you're going to need to refine it. You can refine the selection by clicking on the Select and Mask button in the options bar. In this case, I would recommend you to use the on white view mode. That way you can see the adjustments better. Also, on the onion skinning, increase the opacity to 100% to better see your adjustments. Start by enabling the smart radius, which creates a variable edge width around the edge of your selection. It works great for portraits that include both hair and straight edges. The hair requires a larger refinement area than the shoulders where we have a straight line. So this option helps you create that variable width. Then increase the radius, which determines the selection border in which the edge refinement occurs. Then I would recommend smoothing your selection so that your edges are not so jaggy. And maybe add a little bit of contrast and also shift the selection inward to try to remove those edges. Again, you don't need a perfect selection because the text is only covering part of her body. Also, you don't want to spend too much time refining areas that are not going to be needed. So just fine tune your selection until you're about 80% of the way there. If you have hair on your image, then select the refine edge tool and you can paint directly over the flyaway hairs. This is a difficult area. Photoshop is going to do its best to extract the flyaway hairs from the background. But unfortunately, it won't be a perfect selection, but that's okay. You can fine tune your selection later in the areas that need it. Then I'm going to press OK. With the selection active, I'm going to create a group and I'm going to call that group text. And I'm going to click and drag that group into the top of the layer stack and click and drag our text inside of that group. You're actually going to apply the layer mask to the group and not the text layer. And you'll see why in a moment. So I'm going to enable my text and I'm going to create my layer mask. Notice that the layer mask is only affecting the visible areas of that selection, which is why the text is really not that visible. We want the opposite. So with the layer mask active, when this white outline is around the layer mask, you can click on invert. And now the text is behind there. Now I'm going to undo that just to show you one trick. So with a selection active, make sure that you have your group selected. You can actually hold Alt, Option on the Mac, and click on the layer mask icon to create an inverted layer mask. So that saves you a little bit of time. And the reason that we wanted to include a layer mask in a group and not directly on the text is so that we can have multiple text layers, or any layer really, it doesn't have to be a text layer, that is controlled by the same layer mask. So if we need to make an adjustment to the layer mask, we only do it once and not to every text layer. But in this case, we're only going to work with one text layer. But I still wanted to show you that technique because it can be very useful in a lot of projects. And by the way, let me know in the comments if these techniques are new to you. The only way that I know that the stuff I'm showing you in these tutorials is helpful is by your comments. So please let me know in the comments what's helpful, what's not, and what you're enjoying. It'll really help me out when I create new tutorials. But anyway, we've done a really good job, and I'm going to zoom in so that you can see that the mask here is not perfect, but it really doesn't matter. It looks very realistic once you zoom out. On the other side, we have a couple issues that we may need to fix. If I go to Fit to Screen, it's barely noticeable in this area, and this area does need a little bit of work. So we'll work on this area first. So I'm going to zoom in, click on the Layer Mask, and select the Brush Tool. And I'm going to use the left bracket key on the keyboard to reduce the size of my brush. And I'm just going to paint. And if you hold Shift and click, you can create straight lines as you're painting. So click, hold Shift, and click again, and it creates a straight line between those two points, and that's what I'm doing there. If you paint into the body like I did here on the jaw, you can paint with black to reveal it. Notice that black is my background color, so I can press X on the keyboard to make it my foreground color. Then I can paint to reveal the jaw. Then I can double-click on the Hand Tool to fit everything to screen and see how that looks. Now it's not perfect because the text is actually hiding some of those flyaway hairs in this region and a little bit in this region as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the Brush Tool. I'm going to go into the Brushes Properties, and I'm just going to bring the spacing down to 1%, the size to 1, and since I am working with a pressure-sensitive tablet, I'll be able to use pressure sensitivity when I paint in those hairs. If you don't have a tablet, then no worries. You can just use your mouse and simply use a 1-pixel brush. I'm going to press Z on the keyboard for the Zoom Tool, and I'm going to zoom in to this area here. Press B on the keyboard for the Brush Tool. Then create a new layer and drag it on top of the layer stack. Then you can temporarily select the Eyedropper Tool to select colors by pressing Alt, Option on the Mac. Select the color of any flyaway hair. Then paint flyaway hairs using that color, and I'm going to select the darker color here. Then continue painting flyaway hairs and continue doing the same process with a different color. I'm not going to spend too much time with this process. I think that you get the idea. Once you have your flyaway hairs, you need to match the depth of field of the photo. Notice how the hair strands in the back are blurry. I can go into Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, and I can blur them just a little bit. With the Radius input box active, you can press the Up key on the keyboard, and you can increase the radius by 0.1 pixels, and do that until you match the depth of field of your image. Then press OK. Notice how these areas are not really touching there. If you have that issue, just select the Smudge Tool, and just smudge those in until they touch. And again, you don't have to be very precise because this area is going to be so small once you zoom out. You could also do the same thing on this area here, but again, I'm not going to take the time to do that in the tutorial because it's exactly the same process. And you always want to be organized in name and layer, so I'm going to double-click on the layer name and type in Hair because that's what that layer is controlling. And I'm actually going to put it in the group because if I zoom in, you'll see that we have some pixels going into her neck, but if I click and drag this layer inside of that group, you'll see how now I'm using that same layer mask so that those pixels don't go into her neck. And once again, I'm going to double-click on the Hand Tool. And by the way, if you're interested in another cool tutorial that uses text, then I recommend you watch my tutorial on the Knockout Technique. This tutorial is only 90 seconds long, but it gives you a really, really cool technique that uses a method that not a lot of people know about. I'm going to place a link to it right below in the description. Also, if this is your first time at the Photoshop Training Channel, then don't forget to click on that Subscribe and Notification buttons. If you decide to create something using this technique, don't forget to share it on Instagram with the hashtag PTCBids. Thank you so much for watching, and I will talk to you again in the next tutorial.