Photofiltre Tutorials

 Here is a way to create curved text with Photofiltre.

To create curved text with Photofiltre you will first need to download and install a plugin named Paste Inside/Intofrom the Photofiltre website.

Photofiltre Plugin page here

After that, you will need to unzip the file (CollerDedans.zip) and place the file CollerDedans.pflinto the plugins folder:

 \Program Files\PhotoFiltre\Plugins

Restart Photofiltre to make the plugin active.

Plugin is now ready to use

Select a short sample of text like this using the text tool: Image>Text  OR on the Toolbar denoted with the “T” symbol.

Text box: select font, size and colour.

I find that using bold or italics and some font styles tend to produce distorted results for some reason, so make sure the bold and italics boxes are unchecked. Click Ok when you’ve selected your text.

Text will appear on screen with a selection box surrounding the text.

Next, you will need the copy this text to the clipboard: Edit>Copy

Copy this text to the clipboard

With that done, you can drag the text out of the way or create a new page so a circle may be drawn for the text to be wrapped around.

Draw a suitably sized circle. Use the shift key to make a perfect circle

You can specify the the exact size of the circle if you wish by going to Selection>Manual Settings.

Once you’ve drawn your circle, I find putting on a background grid helpful for lining up.

Turning the background Grid on

Next step is to select the Paste Inside plugin from the menu: Filter>Plugin>Paste Inside

Text is wrapped around circle..now to make further adjustments.

Paste Inside settings box

At first glance the wrapped text may look rather distorted, but the appearance can be improved further with some adjustment of the settings.

Settings to change:

Wrap: Set to Around

Anti-aliasing: Edge, Transparent color checked

Around Setting:

• Weight: Increasing this number makes the text taller.
• Length: Increasing this number makes the text length shorter. The lower the number, the longer the text length.
• Distance: This controls how far away the text is from the circle. Increasing this number moves the text away from circle. A setting of 0 is closest to the circle.
• Offset: This number rotates the text around the cirlce. Text begins at the 9o’clock position. Negative numbers force the text to go anticlockwise direction, whilst positive numbers make text go clockwise.

Text looks better after adjustment

The finished result

If you want to curve the text so that the middle curves down, you’ll need to flip the text vertically before you copy it to the clipboard. Then curve it around with the Paste Inside plugin and then do a flip vertical again afterwards. Use the transform by right clicking the mouse.

Right click to bring up the transform and select Flip vertical

Text is flipped vertically.

Completed curved text.

Text can also be curved over an ellipse like this:

Groovy baby

Text is curved over the top of the ellipse

Now with grid lines removed. 

A few notes on curving text with Photofiltre:

Though you can curve text with the Paste Inside plugin, this is not an ideal method of curving text. For example, if you want to paste the curved text you created onto a picture background, then this tends to be a bit complicated and awkward. Ideally, it would be nice if Photofiltre had a curving function feature built into the text tool, but it doesn’t. So if you want to do some really serious text curving, then perhaps Photofiltre is not the graphics program you should be using. Still… Photofiltre is easy and fun to use without the bloat of many other graphics programs. And FREE.

—oooOOOooo—

Tags: bending text, curved text, Photofiltre