Reverse Out Text

Step 1:

1. Create a new image (500 x 300, White on Black)
2. Add some text

Step 2:

1. Create a new layer
2. Select the selection tool and set it to circle, anti-aliased
3. Draw a selected circle in the new layer
4. Switch to the fill tool, fill the selection with white.
5. Your single layer should look like this (the green shading is transparent)
6. Note: You can draw shapes, rather than select them, but the anti-aliasing gives the circle a smoother edge, with no "jaggies".

Step 3:

1. To finish off, set the circle layer to merge in Difference Mode, rather than Normal

Step 4:

1. OK so far, but what about if you want the text to be coloured?
2. Create a new layer at the top. Fill the layer with the colour of your choice
3. Then, either adjust the layer transparency,
4. And/Or, adjust the merge mode to Darken (the example above)
5. But please fiddle with merge modes, as they give quite different effects

Lighten

Colour

Hard Light

Difference

Step 5:

1. Finally, this reverse out technique will work on any image.
2. The example above is against a grey scale image where the brightness and contrast have been radically adjusted. It actually works against just regular gray scales quite well.

IMPORTANT: When working on strong plain images like this, it is important to save as GIFs to preserve the image quality.

The examples above have been saved as jpegs, and you can see that the jpg format introduces colour artifacts into the plain colours. GIF format does not do that, you can see the difference in the examples below.

JPEG 6KB

GIF 8KB