In this tutorial i will show you how to add a border to your text, or as its called in Photoshop: a Stroke.

For a Stroke consisting of a colour or a pattern you can stroke the selection turned into a path.

As Jolie already showed in this video, never stroke the selection, stroke the path !
http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=116
This is because it will give you the smoothest result possible in Gimp.

Stroking a Path with a color (or a Brush) is your basic stroke technique.
Note that this technique will grow your final text a bit, because the stroke extends to both sides.



But if you want more control, or use a gradient, a pattern or a texture, this is your technique.
Note: instead of using layermasks, like i do, you can just as well delete everything you dont want, but if you later decide you want a different stroke, you'll have to do it all over again. With a layermask, you just have to delete the mask.

1. create a new layer - i used 600x320px in #006900
2. type your text – i used Sans Bold 205px, spacing -11



3. alpha select your text

4. create a new transparent layer on top of your text and name it 'Stroke'

5. fill the selection with your gradient



7. go to Selection -> Shrink and choose a value you want for the thickness of your Stroke
i used 6

08. on your Stroke layer, right click and chose 'Add Layer Mask'
you want the options: 'Selection' and 'Invert Mask'





Thats the basic technique and

09. for this tutorial, we will repeat the same steps but use a pattern to make a second stroke
i used a rust pattern, that i got from a Draconian tutorial (i think)



10. i put the rust pattern stroke underneath the gradient stroke and set the gradient layer mode to 'Value' 60%



11. i added a tiny Inner Glow, a Dropshadow and 'Posterised' the Rust Stroke by 2



and a second example with a gradient overlay, instead of the black text and no rust.



That concludes this tutorial

If you want to have a look at what i did, download the attached xcf-file below.

EDIT: this is an updated version of the tutorial. In the first version we converted each selection into a path in hope we would get a smoother selection. According to saulgoode, this is not the case, which makes the tutorial even simpler.

Saving the selection to a path (and then later converting it back to a selection) is unnecessary and does not improve the quality*. While stroking a path yields smoother results than stroking a selection, the same is not true for filling. This tutorial does not actually stroke either the path or the selection (and the layermask strategy is effectively a "fill").

Aside from that, this is a great technique for creating text borders and the tutorial is well-written and easy to follow.


* There will be a slight difference between a filled selection and a fill of that same selection after being converted to a path and back -- this difference may or may not produce a more pleasing result. Nonetheless, this difference is owing to rounding errors (and path conversion factors) and does not represent an improvement in the quality of the rendering.

EDIT: The reasoning in my asterisk comment is incorrect. The difference is owing to discrepancies in converting the raster-based selection to a vector-based path. In some cases this difference can be very dramatic and/or unpleasant.

well damn, then this tutorial is not a great improvement over my 'tune your text effect' tutorial
i was very sure the stroke would be smoother because i removed some jagged edges with this technique from my resulte, here:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6558

btw, the term Stroke comes from PS layer styles, im not implying we are actually stroking a path

The thing is, the jagged edges exhibited in that tutorial (step 6) stem not from a "selection versus path" issue, but because the anti-aliased edges of the topmost (pattern) layer are partially revealing the anti-aliased edges of the black text layer. The blurring that you performed tended to mitigate this problem, perhaps even to the point of making it unnoticeable, but I would not expect that it eliminated it completely.


I did not know that (I have not really used Photoshop since it was black and white only).

thanks saulgoode, your input is greatly appreciated, i always learn a lot from you !

i want to point something out in connection to the "always stroke the path not the selection" rule of thumb that i have heard and read in almost every text effect tutorial since i started following text effect tutorials. saulgoode talks about the difference between a selection made first hand and the selection you get when you make a path of the first selection and then convert that path to a selection - the difference is there already in the path. this means the stroked path isn't the same as the stroked selection minus jagged edges and plus some extra width - it may actually be very different from the selection and full of little imperfections that may not be important if you're just making a single, simple path stroke, but may make your result unnecessarily messy if you're adding more elements and using the result of the path stroke or if you're stroking with a brush to make for example a dotted outline. i think it's important to remind people that they can always check their path and edit it if they're really after smooth strokes - remove unnecessary nodes, move node handles to get sharp corners and such.

so i edited the tutorial according to saulgoode's input: no more unneccessary converting the selection to a path

the quickest and simplest method to make a border/stroke goes like this:
01. alpha select text
02. create new layer on top, name it 'Stroke'
03. fill 'Stroke Layer' with Gradient/Pattern/Colour
04. shrink selection depending on how thick you want your Stroke/Border
06.
a) hit Del or 'Edit -> Clear'
or
b) apply layermask
07. Deselect