Stroke me, stroke me...

What is this mysterious thing called stroke? I had been working with Photoshop for four years and didn't know until I started editing manga. Since I didn't work a lot with text it makes sense that I didn't know about stroking text. Stroke's basic function is to highlight the text. It does this by surrounding the text with a color. Since we are working primarily with black and white the usual color to use for stroke is white with black text. Normally the only time I use white text is when I am placing text over a black background.

 

So lets have a look at how to find 'stroke' and how to use it. I use stroke often enough that I've set up an action for it so all I have to do is play the action and Photoshop does all these steps for me. There will be a tutorial on how to set up and use actions at a later date.

 

	Before opening up the dialog box make sure you have the text layer that you want to stroke highlighted. To get the stroke dialog box you need to click on layer, move the mouse to layer style then click on stroke.
	Here is the dialog box. Unless you have a large font you should probably set the pixels to 2px. Set the color to white. If you have the preview box checked when you do this you get to see the effects before you commit to it. When you are satisfied with the results click ok and viola you have stroked some text.
	Here there a few things to notice. The black panel has white text. There is no stroke applied to that text layer. The text in the lower right hand panel is plain black text without any stroke applied. The text in the lower left hand panel has had stroke applied to both text layers. You can see how the white around the text brings out the text and makes it easier to read.
	Here you can see that stroke has been applied to the text layer in the panel on the lower right. When you have tone, or line drawing where you plan to place text you should stroke the text layer to make it easier to read. I will apply stroke to a text layer even if the only thing from my text layer that is going to end up over the tone/drawing is a single period.

 

Those are the basics of stroke. If you typeset for any length of time you will end up using it a lot. It's not difficult to do but can be difficult to explain if all you have to use are words. Once I finally understood stroke it was like an "Ah-Ha" moment!

Which is better then the "EH?!" moment I had when someone tried to talk me through how to use stroke in email...

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