It’s always interesting to me to look at our Google Analytics and other site analytics and figure out what people are looking for when they come to our site. From piecing things together, it seems a lot of people are interested in learning about how to write on their photos or add text to a photo, without using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.
Katie did a post a while ago on online photo editors that included a few options. Today, I’m going to show you how to write on your photos (and even add word art to them) quick and easily using PicMonkey.
PicMonkey is free for basic (and even not-so-basic) editing including text, sharpening, adjusting colors, adding effects, collages, and adding word art. They recently launched a paid version as well that has additional features. The paid version is $4.99 a month or $2.75 a month when you sign up for a year. Not bad at all, if you want some of those additional features and effects.
For those of you that would like to know how to get text or writing on your photos without the expense of a photo editing program, here we go…
To get started, just head to PicMonkey.com and click on the handy “Edit a photo” button in the top left:
A window will open where you can navigate to the folder your photo is stored in on your computer. Click on the photo to select it and then click OPEN. Here’s what my window looked like once I had opened my photo (one of my all-time favorites of my kids):
I want to add some type, so I click on the letter P on the left:
This pulls up all of the font choices, they are grouped by style (which is a fun thing). Any of the fonts (or other items, for that matter) with a crown next to them are only included in an Upgraded account:
I’m going to use the Serif font Special Elite for the first part of my writing on the photo. I’ll click on the font name and then click on the Add Text button:
Now, here is what my screen looked like:
Next, click where it says, “Type your text here” to get a cursor and then start typing. The only setting I changed bellow was to center justify the text:
Next, I’m going to hit enter for a new line and then I selected the Marcelle Script font and changed the color to a nice yellow:
Now, I’m going to highlight the word sunshine and drag the size slider to make it larger:
I want all of the words to be a bit larger to fill that space. So, I will highlight all of the words and use the slider to make them all bigger (but it will keep the word Sunshine a larger size than the rest of the text):
I moved the text slightly and then, once I was happy, I clicked save. Here’s the window I got next (it made me laugh):
Here’s a look at my finished photo:
Now, what if you have some really cool word art from a digital scrapbooking kit that you want to add to the photo? Just click on Overlays in the menu on the left:
Then click on the “Your Own” button and then find the file you want to use, click on it, then click OPEN (I’m using word art by CD Muckosky):
When I imported the word art, PicMonkey sized it down a bit. I was able to size it back up with the corner handles without a problem. I also clicked and dragged the image to the upper left corner:
I saved this using the same steps as above. Here’s what the finish product looked like:
I loved that photo before, but now it SAYS something too…literally!
I had a lot of fun playing in PicMonkey, have you used it for any quick effects? I would love to hear what you’ve done in the comments!
Probably the biggest question I see in my inbox from readers is, “Steph, where do you print your Photobooks now?” It’s usually written after someone reads the 
