Food Photography Tutorial| How to Fake Photoshop to add designs and graphics to pictures!

Adding beautiful designs and graphics on images is totally in style right now, at least on food images. It goes without saying that the best looking images were clearly created in Photoshop.

What if you don’t have photoshop? I don’t have photoshop, not yet at least, but that doesn’t stop me from adding some interesting patterned text on my pictures!  I’ve had a lot of requests on how to do this, so I thought I’d do a pictorial posts with some of my tips.

These are some of my pictures I played around adding some texts on it!

Like I said no photoshop or lightroom or any other expensive/paid tool is required. All you need is picasa!

First, to show you how I do it, I downloaded from net a image with some cool text on it, and then I recreate similar design on my pictures using PICASA! It took under 5 minutes to make.

Picture on left is a randomly selected from internet and the picture on right is my picture of Toddy Palm Seeds Ice Cream on which I tried to get the similar design.

Pretty impressive, right?

So let’s see how to do that. Here we go!

Please Note – First, Through this post I don’t intend to say that Picasa or any other cheap tool can be used in place of Photoshop. Photoshop is THE BEST and nothing can replace it. This is just an attempt to fake PS( to add cool text format on pictures) for someone like me who don’t have PS. PS has it’s own benefits and is the BEST post processing tool used by many photographers and it offers features like nothing other tool can offer. Second, before you decide to add designs or text on your pictures  always remember, the patterns and text should not over ride the pictures main hero(food), it should enhance picture with the focus being on the main dish. You need to have a empty space to add text, but if you plan to put the design and text overlaying  the food like the way I did in the example, please make sure they don’t take your focus away from the food. Also adding these patterns and text are personal choice, since I love them so much I try to add them, but not every picture will look good with these, you need to understand how can you blend the text with the food and make both look complimenting each other.

This post includes an introduction, download appropriate free fonts and frames, adding them to images-

1. Download picasa. Don’t worry it’s free and you can get it from here…https://picasa.google.com/
2. Incorporate free fonts and frames/shapes. The one thing that will take your image from standard to impressive is free fonts.  There are some great websites out there (I love dafont.com) and you can even search “free fonts” on Pinterest to see links to some that others use. It is SO easy to download and install them. Search for “Shapes” or “Frames” in dafont.com. You will find some cool patterns available. These are just like fonts and to use them you download and install them on your computer.  Every letter represents a wingding like graphics. Some of the best shapes that I like and use it extensively is  KG Flavor and Frames, my favorite being KG Flavor and Frames Three.

This is how you download and install a frame/shape – Select a font or shape or frame from the internet(dafont.com). Click on the download option->this will save the font on your hard disk. Next open it, and double click on the “TrueType Font file”. An installation window will open with options install or print. Click on install and wait till the process completes. Repeat the steps for fonts or shapes that you want to use. After you install the fonts you will be able to see them in picasa, word document, power point.

3. That’s it! We are ready to rock and roll! Open your picture in picasa.

 

4. Click on text option on left side of the screen. Click on font options, you will see the fonts you installed on your computers.

 

5. Type letter ‘k’  on top of font options drop down menu and scroll down to select the font/shape KG Flavors and Frames Five

6. Type a letter and check the shapes linked to the letter, caps letters have different shapes.. I’m using letter ‘o’ shape.

7.Increase the font size or drag using hand symbol. Increase it until it fits the screen. And then move it around to place it on the picture.(P.S. – I intend to cut both the edges which have an pointy edges, so I have to increase the size until the pointy edges are out of the picture frame, any thing out of picture frame will be cropped!) You can change the color of the shape too. I have white chosen. Once your shape is placed in a desired place, click apply button.

Check what happens when I click on apply button. Pointy edges gone! I did this as I wanted a rectangular frame/shape.

8.

To make the shape transparent, click on the shape , and on left side of the screen , reduce the transparency slide bar.

My option was slightly more than 50% transparency. Check out below image-

Click on apply button. And the frame/shape looks like the one below(exactly what we wanted). Save the changes added, ctrl key + S

 

9. Final shape/frame is added to the image, now we add text on top on the frame. To add text first click on the text box(previous selected text will be displayed in the font option, in this case we had selected KG Flavor and Frames Five to add the rectangular block). There is a drop down menu which you will scroll through to select your desired font.

10. For the word amazing, I used the font ‘CAC Champagne’

Next tilt the font to an inclined angle, I tilted to 25 degree. To tilt hold the mouse pointer at the red button you see on the text box and drag it to 25 deg.

Position the font to it’s correct place and click apply. Changes will be updated like shown below.

11. Follow the above step to add “Toddy palm seeds”  and “ Icecream” text. I used font café & brewery  for “toddy palm seeds” text, adjusted the text size and dragged it to fit in a correct place. Once done click on apply button.

Similar steps to be followed for adding “ice cream” text. I used font name IrisUPC for this text.

My final image with graphics and text added and saved. Pretty close uh to what we are looking for?!   Do try it and you will be amazed how lovely your photos looks with these simple graphics and text!