Recoloring Word Art in Photoshop

Have you ever had one of those “duh!” moments when you realized that there was a better way of doing something? I had one of those moments recently when I discovered the purpose for one of those (many) little buttons in Photoshop that I hadn’t used and didn’t really understand.

Let me tell you how I used to recolor word art. When I first started digital scrapbooking, I used to use the paint bucket tool to fill in solid areas of color. Later, I found out that the paint bucket isn’t the best tool to use in this case. The paint bucket tool tends to turn smooth edges jagged. I have no idea why this happens, but I know that I don’t like it. Also, using the paint bucket tool results in “flat” color. Let me show you what I mean with an example. I’ve opened up one of the papers from Penny’s 12 Months: April kit and put two copies of a word art from her new Word Jumbles: Spring pack on the paper. I’m going to recolor the top one using the paint bucket tool. To do this, select the paint bucket tool in the tools palette and make sure that ‘contiguous’ isn’t selected then click on any part of the word art.

It looks pretty good now, but if you compare the top and bottom images, you can see that the top image no longer has the faded text that was in the original word art – the color is “flat”. Once I realized that the paint bucket tool wasn’t giving me the result I wanted, I started adding a layer of solid color above the word art and clipping it (right-click > create clipping mask) to the word art layer. This method preserved the fading of the text, but resulted in extra layers in my file. I could have merged the color layer to the word art layer, but that got to be a lot of mouse clicks. I’m always on the lookout for an easier way to do things, so I was excited when I learned about the ‘lock transparent pixels’ button in the layers palette and realized how it could help with recoloring word art (and other things).

With the word art layer selected, click on the ‘lock transparent pixels’ button in the layers palette. It’s the one right next to the word ‘lock:’ and it looks like a transparent background. You’ll see a little lock icon appear on the layer when you click the button. Now I can choose to recolor the word art in a couple of ways. Sometimes I use the brush tool with a large solid brush and sometimes I use the paint bucket tool. I’m going to use the paint bucket tool so that we can compare the results with the first recolored image and see the effect of locking the transparent pixels.

You can see that in the layer with the locked transparent pixels the text still looks faded. A much better result! What about the jagged edges I was describing earlier? I’m going to overlap the two layers and zoom to 100% so that we can compare the two layers better.

Comparing the two like this, we can see clearly that the copy of the word art with the transparent pixels locked kept the faded text of the original and we can also see that the edges of the letters are much smoother than on the one that was recolored without locking the transparent pixels.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments section and I’ll do my best to answer you. And I’d love to know if you use the ‘lock transparent pixels’ button for something else that I haven’t thought about yet.

Have a great day and happy scrapping!