Add Text to a Photo

Most casual editors rasterize text the instant you place it: the letters become pixels at whatever size your preview happens to be, and every later scale-up softens them. This editor keeps text as vector outlines through the whole session and rasterizes exactly once, at export, using the output dimensions. The practical consequence: the same caption is drawn with equally clean letterforms whether you export at 800 pixels wide for a chat message or 8000 pixels wide for a print file.

Legibility over a photograph is a contrast problem, and there are three standard fixes. An outline (a stroke around each letter in a contrasting color) works over anything and is the most compact. A drop shadow lifts text off midtone backgrounds with a softer look. A scrim - a translucent band behind the text - is the choice for longer passages, because it evens out the background across the whole block. Pick one; stacking all three is the typographic equivalent of shouting.

A few composition habits pay off immediately. Keep text away from the subject's face or the product itself; align blocks to an imaginary grid rather than eyeballing; and resist using more than two fonts on one image. If the destination is a platform that crops - story formats, thumbnails, cover photos - keep critical words near the center, since edges are the first thing cropping eats.

Format choice affects how crisp the letters survive. PNG preserves the hard black-to-white transitions of text perfectly and is the right pick when words dominate the image. JPEG compresses photographs better but tends to smudge faint ringing around high-contrast letter edges, so if you must use it, keep quality high.