How To Add Large Text To Picture

seekermeister · 08 Mar 2011

allend66 said:

seekermeister said:

The file extension is the same on all of my thumbnails...jpg.

Excuse me Sir, but the one you uploaded earlier, and the one I did for you were PNG... (post 5 & 8 I saved as jpg)

Ditch Picasa if your not happy with it - it won't be a pleasure to do the work otherwise. You could try Zoner Photo Studio (which I used earlier for you). It's simple but feature packed...

The reason that those were png, was because that is the way that I uploaded them, not because they were that way from the start, nor is it the way that they are now.

I may well try Zoner, if this I can't get Picasa to work for me. Thanks for the suggestion.

mitchell65 · 08 Mar 2011

seekermeister said:

I'll do better than that. If these are not enough, I got five more of the same series.

Well I can certainly open them in Picasa but they are so small I cannot get a font size small enough to fit!
In you post above you say:

The reason that those were png, was because that is the way that I uploaded them, not because they were that way from the start, nor is it the way that they are now.

How did you convert them to JPG? Did you just rename them using a different file extension?

seekermeister · 08 Mar 2011

I never converted them to .jpg, that is the way that they came either from my scanner, or downloaded from Google. There was no good reason for me to convert the other images to png, except just plain old habit.

EDIT: Again, the question is not if you can get them to open in Picasa, it is whether you can tell me how to get them to do so. Did you just use the means that you described previously?

seekermeister · 08 Mar 2011

allend66,

I have gotten further with Zonar than I have with Picasa, but the free version is not all that feature rich, and I'm not inclined to buy it. I did get a thumbnail numbered, but not really as I would like it. I found no option for outlining, there was no pencil style coloring, only paint brush, which covered a very wide area. I was able to use paintbrush in this one instance, but I doubt that would often be true. In addition to outlining text, I would like to have control over the fill color separately, and also be able to place shadowing around the text for contrast. I'm going to continue with this,until I can find something more to my liking. Thanks.

EDIT: A curious issue with this, is that after saving the thumb with Zoner, with I checked back in Movie Collector, where it is to be used, and the change was visible in the details window (which appears after selecting a thumb), but not in the image window that you select a movie from, which is where it needs to be most. This is a separate issue which has nothing to do with editing the thumbs, but it is one that I will have to figure out.

mitchell65 · 08 Mar 2011

seekermeister said:

allend66,

I have gotten further with Zonar than I have with Picasa, but the free version is not all that feature rich, and I'm not inclined to buy it. I did get a thumbnail numbered, but not really as I would like it. I found no option for outlining, there was no pencil style coloring, only paint brush, which covered a very wide area.

Which is precisely why I recommended Picasa in the first place. You will ,of course, have a much wider choice if you pay for the software but I can understand you do not want to do this for just this comparatively small job.
If you are willing to have one more go before giving p with Picasa then please try this.
Close everything down back to your desktop.
Click the Start button, then Computer then navigate to one of the offending images.
Right click on the file and choose "Open With" then choose the "Choose default program" button.
Go straight to the Browse button.
Navigate to C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Picasa/Picasa3.exe
Click "Open"
If the image does not open now then there is either something wrong with the image or the Picasa installation had a glitch.
You did say:

There was no good reason for me to convert the other images to png, except just plain old habit.

Sorry to labour this point but I do think this is where the problem is. I have just done a test and I can replicate your problem if I rename a PNG file to a JPG by just altering the file extension. It shows up but everything is greyed out! Can you please just explain how if you had a PNG file you would covert it to a JPG and vice versa? This is most important if we are to solve this!

allend66 · 08 Mar 2011

seekermeister said:

... there was no pencil style coloring, only paint brush, which covered a very wide area. ....

Seekermeister, the paintbrush tool is a combo pencil/paintbrush... you can edit all settings giving you pinstripe thin lines to fat swathes, from razor sharp edges to blur, spacing, colour... try experimenting... (see scrreshot)

Though I'll admit I'm not one to flog a dead horse - if you don't like Zoner, ditch it and move on to the next. Have you tried Paint.net? It's listed in the free programs thread here and is thought highly of...

seekermeister · 08 Mar 2011

mitchell65,

I will have another go with Picasa as you suggested, but it is going to have to wait a bit...I have something else going on. The file conversion has nothing to do with the problem that you and I have been working on, because those SG-1 images have never been anything other than what they are now...jpg. The only thing that may have been caused by this conversion was the Sea Hunt image that allend66 was helping me with.

seekermeister · 08 Mar 2011

allend66 said:

seekermeister said:

... there was no pencil style coloring, only paint brush, which covered a very wide area. ....

Seekermeister, the paintbrush tool is a combo pencil/paintbrush... you can edit all settings giving you pinstripe thin lines to fat swathes, from razor sharp edges to blur, spacing, colour... try experimenting... (see scrreshot)

Though I'll admit I'm not one to flog a dead horse - if you don't like Zoner, ditch it and move on to the next. Have you tried Paint.net? It's listed in the free programs thread here and is thought highly of...

Thanks, but I'm a person with a one track mind, and can only focus on one program at a time. I will take another look at Zonar and see if I can get it to do what I want. If not, then Paint.net comes next. Somewhere along the line, I will find something.

mitchell65 · 09 Mar 2011

seekermeister said:

mitchell65,

The file conversion has nothing to do with the problem that you and I have been working on, because those SG-1 images have never been anything other than what they are now...jpg. The only thing that may have been caused by this conversion was the Sea Hunt image that allend66 was helping me with.

Sorry but I beg to differ. The files you uploaded here had the file extension JPEG not JPG. I was just wondering how they got named that way.

seekermeister · 09 Mar 2011

Regardless of which extension that it was, the only one that I changed was Sea Hunt, and I did that with Paint.