Step 4: Select The Type Tool

We're ready to add our text. We'll need Photoshop's Type Tool for that, so select it from the Tools panel, or press the letter T on your keyboard to quickly select it with the shortcut:

Photoshop gives us the option to add either point type or area type to our documents. Point type is your basic single line of text, usually either a heading or a short caption. Adding point type is as easy as clicking with the Type Tool at the point in the document where you want the line of text to appear and then adding your text. As long as the text you're adding is short enough that you're not worried about it extending out beyond the edge of the document, point type is usually the way to go.

Area type, on the other hand, is used when you have large amounts of text, say one or more paragraphs, and you need to make sure that all of the text stays within the boundaries of the document or within a certain area of the document. Since we need to fill our entire document with text, we'll need to use area type.

To add area type, we first need to define the boundaries for the text, and we do that by dragging out a text frame, which looks very similar to the same sort of basic selection we dragged out earlier with the Rectangular Marquee Tool. Once we have the text frame in place, any text we add will be confined within the frame.

With the Type Tool selected, click in the very top left corner of the document, then drag down to the very bottom right corner of the document so that the text frame covers the entire document area when you're done. As you drag, you'll see the outline of your text frame appearing. Just as when dragging out a selection with the Rectangular Marquee Tool, you can reposition the text frame as you're dragging it out if needed by holding down your spacebar, dragging the frame to a new location, then releasing your spacebar and continuing to drag. When you're done, release your mouse button and you should see your text frame surrounding the entire document, although it may be a little difficult to see in the small screenshot:

Step 5: Select Your Font Options In The Options Bar

Now that we have our text frame in place, we can add our text. Before we do though, we'll need to choose which font we want to use. Any time the Type Tool is selected, the Options Bar at the top of the screen will show various options for working with text in Photoshop, including options for choosing a font, font style, font size, text color, and so on. The exact fonts you have to choose from will depend on whichever ones you currently have installed on your computer. You'll probably need to experiment a few times with this since the font you choose, especially the font size, will have a large impact on the overall look of the effect. To preserve as much detail in the portrait as possible, you'll want to use a small font size. Of course, the smaller the font, the more text you'll need to add to fill up the entire document area.

I'm going to stick with something simple, like Arial Black, and I'll choose 12 pt for my font size to keep it small enough to maintain lots of detail in the portrait:

We'll need our text color to be white, so if yours is currently set to some other color, click on the color swatch in the Options Bar, which will bring up Photoshop's Color Picker, and choose white. Click OK when you're done to exit out of the Color Picker. The color swatch in the Options Bar should now be filled with white:

Step 6: Add Your Text To The Document

All we need to do now is to add the text. As I mentioned at the beginning of the tutorial, you can personalize the text portrait effect by writing something specific about the person in the photo, or you can simply copy and paste enough text from somewhere to fill up the document. Since I'm using a stock photo for this tutorial and I don't actually know the person in the image (although I'm sure he's a nice guy with lots of good stories to share), I'll simply add some standard "lorem ipsum" page filler text. When you're done, you're entire document should be filled with white text:

To accept the text and exit out of text editing mode, click on the small checkmark in the Options Bar:

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