Tutorial: Speech Bubbles

Sometimes in MC photomanip, we come across a set of pictures that demands a more structured narrative, thus picture series are born. Every one has their preference in the style of picture series, mine is in comic styles as the dialogues are much easier to follow and more complex exchanges can happen.

I started my picture series The Taming last week, and learnt a few tricks that I'd like to share with you! Starting with Speech Bubbles!

I'm starting with speech bubbles because it's relevant to more people. I've seen different methods by different people, but as a fan of non-destructive and editable content, my approach may be slightly different.

To start, let's write our dialogue, this will form the basis of our speech bubble by giving us an idea of its size, and whether it fits well with the picture. Use the type tool and drag a box on your picture.

Before you type anything, make sure your text is center aligned. I've chosen the font AR CENA which came with my computer, size 40 and anti-aliasing method as Crisp. These settings will be dependent on your taste and the resolution of your piece.

Tip: Layout your pictures and panels first to gage what font size is readable. Ideally you want the font to be readable when the full image is displayed, so don't go too small.

Let's get typing!

Resize the text box after you're done to give it the best possible general shape. Don't worry about how square it is for now, we'll fix that later. You just want the aspect ratio to be generally pleasing, I find ratios of 2:1 to 3:1 work best. Any wider and it feels somewhat off to me.

Now that we've got the text, let's get our speech bubble going.

Select the Ellipse Tool and draw an ellipse beneath the text. Be sure that your tool is set to Shape Layer mode.

Now let's make the text more rounded. Double click on the text layer thumbnail to select all the text. Copy the text into clipboard.

Now hide the text layer and select the vector mask from the shape layer.

Keeping your type tool selected, hover your cursor over the ellipse now. It should change to the following shape:

Click on the shape and you'll be able to paste your text inside the ellipse.

What happens here is that a type path is created for the text, so that the text cannot fall outside of the shape path we originally chose.

Unfortunately Photoshop's text in shape feature is a bit limited, and there's no vertical alignment options nor padding, so the current result is not the greatest. The first word is just sitting at the top on its own.

There are different ways to fix this. The easy way, is to ignore the shape and stick to the paragraph text. But for the perfectionists out there, here's another approach:

Insert a line break at the top, and set the first line's font size to 1pt.

Now our text is still touching the bubble, we'll fix that by tweaking the type path. Keeping the text layer selected, go to the Paths pane and you'll find the type path:

Select the path and Press Ctrl + T (Edit > Free Transform Path). Now we can resize the path to effectively create the padding manually! Hold down Alt + Shift together and drag the corner handle to resize the shape.

Holding the Alt key basically resizes the object (the path here) using the bullseye marker as the center point.

Holding the Shift key maintains the aspect ratio during resize.

Once you're happy with the type path size, commit the changes by pressing Enter or clicking on the tick in the top toolbar. Now we have ourselves a nicely padded text the conforms to the speech bubble, with some padding from the edge. Experiment with this stage, you may find better tricks to perfect the padding issue, and I hope you'll share it with me!

You may also want to move the type layer a bit to improve the vertical alignment.

Next, let's give our speech bubble an outline. Simply select the shape layer and add Stroke effects to it. The Size depends on your font size and page dimension, in my case I'm using 6px. For position, I prefer to use Center as it looks much more hand drawn than Outside or Inside. The difference is more noticeable in the next step.

Now that we have our bubble, we need the speech bubble pointer to direct the attention to the speaker. This is where shape layers really shine!

Keeping the shape layer selected, go to the paths pane again.

Pick up the pen tool, ensure it's in Paths mode, and draw a triangle on top of your bubble. Annoyingly you can't seem to draw directly onto the vector mask if no alteration has been made initially, but after this step you'll be able to draw in the Vector Mask directly.

Now we've ended up with a new work path. Use the Path Selection Tool and click on your triangle, copy and paste it onto the Vector Mask of your speech bubble Shape layer.

Your speech bubble should now look something like this.

Notice that while you have two separate shapes on top of each other in the Vector Mask, the layer fill and stroke effect occurs AFTER the vector mask has been applied, which means it's filled in and stroked as one continuous shape. This is how we can essentially create complex shapes (in this case the speech bubble) easily.

Note that you can also start drawing directly onto the Vector mask using the pen tool now, as Photoshop seems to unlock the Mask for editing after the copying and pasting step. So now you can create cool things like chained speech bubbles:

Tip: To make the setup more flexible for changes, create additional shape layers first for each of the bubbles, and keep the text and the bubbles linked together (as a group, or using linked layers) so that you can move them around freely.

Once you're happy with the layout, start copying the ellipses from the new bubbles vector masks onto your main vector mask - so that you can have a single seemless shape. Group the text and the shape layers together and you've got yourself a speech bubble group!

Shape Layers / Vector Masks are a fantastic way of creating speech bubbles because they're vector based and thus can scale without loss of quality. You can manipulate them at any point very easily by simply tweaking the paths.

Finally, a little something about the Stroke Position. Here's a comparison of outside, center and inside:

As you can see, the speech pointer looks a bit off for Outside stroking; Inside stroking looks too sharp an artificial; Center just gives it that hand-drawn look. Still.. preferences and all!

I hope you guys find this tutorial useful, and please feel free to leave any feedback!