(Editing) TEXT BOX & IMAGE OVERLAYING

Click here to show the Text & Image Overlays Screen.

If you want to add text overlays or image overlays to an image, you can do so by clicking on the button that looks like a "T/I" on the "Quick Tools" panel. This function also makes it very EASY to create and edit business cards..

Let's say you want to add a bunch of text to a photo along with your company logo. Let's say you want to take two photos and do the old fashioned DOUBLE-EXPOSURE effect. This is where you can do that sort of thing. The Text Boxes function has many features to create cool effects, such as Shadowing, Outlining and creating vertical text as well. You can also select an image that is your company logo and place it onto your photo.

If you want to add a bunch of Text overlays and Image overlays to a bunch of photos all at once, you can do so with the Batch Feature.

HINT: You can take the text/image overlays that you add to photo #1 and then go into photo #2 and recall the same overlays. This allows for QUICK addition of the SAME TEXT and SAME LOGOS/IMAGES to multiple images. When photo #2 is loaded, just click on the "Previous Settings" button.

HINT: Also, any text comments or Database fields that you may have for your images can be integrated into the Text Boxes Overlays too. Basically the integrated text can be placed onto your image just like any other text you would type. When used in BATCH mode, you can essentially put individualized captions on lots of images in ONE operation.

General information:
This feature allows you to add as many text boxes and image overlays as you want to any image. You can control the number of overlays by using the "Add Overlay" and "Delete Overlay" buttons. Each Overlay Tab has certain properties that determine how the text will appear. If you change your mind, you can "Cancel".

This window is divided into 3 main areas.

Small Preview: This has the same functionality as the Actual Size preview

Actual Size Preview: This has the same functionality as the Small preview

Overlay Tabs: This is where you set the text box settings.

Selecting, Positioning And Resizing The Overlay Boxes

The preview areas are used to Position the overlay boxes and to resize the overlay boxes. Just click on the text you want to edit in the preview and the appropriate tab will be selected. You can then DRAG the selected box around on the image. You can also stretch and shrink the box by dragging the EDGES of the selected box.
HINT: There is a "Cropping Aspect Ratio" checkbox that allows you to KEEP the aspect ratio of the original photo's aspect. That makes resizing the image easier.

NOTE: If you have several text boxes and some are covering up the text box you want to select, you can select it by clicking on the TABS at the top of the window showing all the text boxes tabs.

The Overlay Tabs are used to set all the options for the text box or image overlay. You can control 3-D shadowing, and outlining and the direction of the text etc.

STYLES: To see how to use saved styles to your advantage, click here.

OVERLAY TAB:
The overlay tab starts off with ONE tab. You can add many tabs by clicking on the "Add Overlay" button. This takes the current text settings (or  image settings) and creates a NEW overlay tab based on it. If you want to get rid of an overlay tab, just click on the "Delete Overlay". If you have MANY OVERLAY Tabs and you want to see exactly how all the text additions and logo images will appear, click on the "Re-Build All Overlays" button. This is especially useful if you have a lot of overlapping text boxes and image overlays want to see which ones appear on top of each other.

Overlay Settings:

Image Overlay / Double-Exposure:
Each overlay tab has the option of being a TEXT overlay or an Image overlay. If you want a LOGO image overlay, then check the "Image Overlay / Double-Exposure" checkbox. This allows you to select from many IMAGE option settings. If you do NOT check the "Image Overlay / Double-Exposure" checkbox, then the options shown on the tab are for TEXT box overlaying.

TEXT OVERLAYING SETTINGS

Text Memo Area: This is a text box that allows you to type as much text as you like. This is a multi-line text area that can contain line-breaks (carriage returns) for blank lines in the output.
NOTE: As you type text into the text overlay box, there is about a 1 second delay before you will see the result in the preview windows.

NOTE: You can integrate any text comments or database fields you have so that they appear in the text memo area. Simply use the following codes in your text:

This inserts the text that was assigned as a "Text Comment".

This inserts the text that was assigned to the database "CATEGORY" field using the "Database Editor".

This inserts the text that was assigned to the database "KEYWORDS" field using the "Database Editor".

This inserts the text that was assigned to the database "NOTES" field using the "Database Editor".

EXAMPLE: If you typed the following into the memo area...

This picture is of type

It's possible that the actual text added to the image could be...

This picture is An example Moon photo of type Astronomy

Font Selection: This is the "F" button. It's a standard font selection window that allows you to pick any font and font color and size etc.

Foreground Color: This allows you to change the font's foreground color.

Background Color: This allows you to change the font's background color.

Smoothing: This allows most fonts larger than 12 points to be smoothed in appearance so that it looks better.

Outline Text: This allows you to outline the text with a different color for a cool looking effect.

Outline Color: This allows you to pick the outline color.

Transparent Background: This allows you to make the background transparent so that all you see is the text overlaid on top of the image.

Strength Sliders: These sliders control the visibility of the Main Image and the Overlay region. The Main Slider IS LOCKED to the Overlay slider. This means if you move the Main slider to the left, then the main image underneath the overlay will show at 0% strength and the Overlay will show at 100% strength. And if you move the main slider to the right, then the main image will show at 100% strength and the overlay at 0% strength.
NOTE: If you want the sliders to be UNLOCKED, so that as you move one slider, the other doesn't move, you can click on the LINK BUTTON to the left of these sliders. It makes it EASY to do the double exposure effect which is both sliders set to 100%..

Feathering Mode: This allows you to select if you what type of feathering you may want. Feathering blends the image with the original underlying image.

Feathering Amount: This allows you to control how much feathering will take place. The more you move the slider to the right, the more feathering will occur.

Quick Alignment: This allows you to quickly align a text box on any of the 4 sides of an image. (Left, Top, Right, Bottom). It not only positions the text box, but also SIZES the text box so that it's a fixed text height that fits about a 36pt size just snug.
NOTE: When alignment other than "No Special Alignment" is selected, you can NOT MOVE the overlay around.

Justification: This allows you to do the standard text justification (Left, Center, Right). The text is justified inside the text box.

Text Direction: This allows you to have horizontal text or vertical text (Up, Down) For vertical text, you need to have the text box TALLER than it is wide.

Left Margin: This determines how much of a left margin you want for the text.

Right Margin: This determines how much of a right margin you want for the text.

3-D Shadow Effects: This controls if you have shadowing effects turned on or off.

Depth: This controls how deep the shadow appears.

Shadow Color: This specifies the shadow's color.

Shadow Direction: This specifies the shadow's direction.

Text Box Overflow: Sometimes it's nice to know, if the text you are placing inside a text box, fits completely. The most useful situations are when you have many lines of text and you are sizing the box and you THINK you have enough height to contain all the lines but instead you are too short and miss the last few lines and don't even realize it. By having a visual indicator, you can know immediately that your height is too short. Also, let's say you are in batch mode and you have various photos of various sizes and it turns out that although some of the output images contain the text boxes perfectly, but that some of them may have text boxes that show incomplete text because the text box was not large enough. This visual indicator will let you know that not all of the text was put into the text box. There are 3 options:

Ignore text overflow:  Don't check for text boxes overflowing

Check that text fits inisde box: Make sure that the complete text fits entirely inside the text box

Check that text fits inside box (ignoring descenders): Same as above, except that any lower case descenders are not checked to see if they fit. That way if you know everything is in uppercase, you can have a text box that is SLIGHTLY shorter than if you had picked the option above.
NOTE: The visual indicator is a RED BAR shown on the edge of the box that ended up clipping off part of the text.

IMAGE OVERLAYING SETTINGS

Browse Image Overlay: This allows you to select the image you want to overlay onto your main image. Typically this will be some sort of company logo that you mght want to place in a corner of a photo. After you select an image the filename of your image will appear under this button.

Set Image Crop Box 100%: After you select an image, you can resize it and move it around the photo just like you would with a text box overlay. If you've resized it and want it back to it's original size, then click this button. You will see the overlay box snap back to the original image size.
NOTE: IF the image is so LARGE that it won't fit onto the main image, then the image can NOT be resized to 100%, but it will be resized as large as possible.
HINT: As you drag and resize the image overlay you will see the percentage width and percentage height appear below this button. This is so that you can tell if you've resized the image to be twice as big (200%) etc...

Enable Transparency Features: If UN-checked, the image that you loaded will be exactly what appears overlaid onto the main image. If checked, then you can do the following:

Change the background color

Make the background color transparent

If CHECKED, then you are indicating that the image was designed with transparency in mind. A transparent image is one that has some design on it and then a background of a SOLID color. This solid background color is called the BACKGROUND COLOR. In order for Photo Jockey to know WHICH color is the background color, Photo Jockey AUTOMATICALLY selects the color in the LOWER-LEFT corner of the image. Whatever color happens to be there is automatically the background color.

New Background Color: If you want to select a different background color you can click on this colored button. Then when the image is overlaid onto the main image, the background color from the source image is converted to this new background color that you selected. That way, if your image had a BLUE background and you don't like blue and don't want to edit the image, then just click this button and you can change the BLUE to some other color of your choice WITHOUT having to edit the image.

Tolerance: Let's say you took a photo of someone standing in front of a GREEN wall. And let's say that you wanted the green wall to become transparent. Well, the grreen in the image most likely will NOT be a solid even color. So, there is NO single color to represent your background color. With the TOLERANCE slider, you can slide it more to the right and it will accept more variations of the green in the wall to be considered as the background color. Then when you use the "Transparent Background" option, the ENTIRE WALL could become see-through.

Transparent Background: This allows you to make the background transparent so that all you see is the image overlay and the background transparency color becomes clear so that you see the underlying main image instead of some solid color.

Strength Sliders: These sliders control the visibility of the Main Image and the Overlay region. Each image (Main, Overlay) can have it's own visibility strength froim 0 to 100%. If you set both to 50% then you will see both images equally at 1/2 brightness. If you set both to 100%, then you have effectively made a DOUBLE-EXPOSURE. If you set both to 0% then you are not thinking properly.
NOTE: If you want the sliders to be LINKED so that as you move one, the other moves, you can click on the LINK BUTTON to the left of these sliders. It makes it EASY to FADE IN/OUT the overlay image. Try it, you will like it.

Feathering Mode: This allows you to select if you what type of feathering you may want. Feathering blends the image with the original underlying image.

Feathering Amount: This allows you to control how much feathering will take place. The more you move the slider to the right, the more feathering will occur.

Batch Mode Auto Sizing: This checkbox only appears if you are processing a BATCH of images. This should be checked if you are in batch mode AND WANT relative positioning and sizing. So, if your batch includes many images of varying dimensions, you might want this checked so that the resulting text looks proportional. So, if you have text with a size of 32 on a LARGE image, then if the batch has a SMALL image, then the text size will auto adjust down to let's say 16. This way when you look at both the large and small images the text look to be the same size in relation to the size of the image. Play with it and see how it effects the results of a batch of varying sized images.
NOTE: If you have some Image overlays instead of Text, these too will be proportionally sized and positioned.

WHEN DONE:
After you are done adding your overlays, you have a few choices to choose from.

ACCEPT: This takes the current overlay and applies them to the main image and exits to the main window. If you are in batch mode, then this sets the overlays to add to all the images in the batch.

CANCEL: This allows you to abort and cancel out of any overlay changes/additions. If you are adding overlays from the Custom Print Layout window, then this will NOT remove the overlays from the photo. You will of course need to use the "Delete Overlay" button.

PREVIOUS SETTINGS: This allows you to use the SAME overlays as you did the last time you used this Overlay function.

NO TEXT/IMAGE OVERLAY BOXES: If you are adding/changing Text or Image overlay boxes from the Custom Print Layout window, then check this box to remove all overlays from the photo at once. This is the only way to remove all of the overlays while in the custom print layout screen. Of course in the normal mode of operation, if you click CANCEL, then no overlays would be added to the image.

Pull Down List To Load Existing Settings Style: If you are wanting to re-load a previously saved settings style, choose the style name from the pull down list. You will have the opportunity to clear you current settings before loading the new settings. This will remove any existing overlays to start fresh and then it will add all the overlays that were saved with the settings style. Or you can elect to KEEP your current settings and ADD the saved style settings to your current settings.

Save Settings: If you want to save all your text/image overlays for later use after you've exited Photo Jockey, then click this button and save your settings with a style name of your choice.

Remove Settings: If you no longer want a style setting in the pull down list, then click this button. This will remove it from the list of available style settings.



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