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Photo Story 3 - Add Titles

Add text to any picture in your story.

Photo Story 3 treats the first picture as the title page and doesn't apply motion to it, and it puts motion on each of following pictures. You can override these defaults by adding motion to the first picture or removing the motion from any of the others... and you can add text to any picture, not just the first one.

... use any font on your computer. if you remember using a font before and you can't find it today... that's because your computer and operating system comes with a set of fonts, which you can add to by installing software that includes extra fonts, or you can obtain and install special font files. You don't do it in Photo Story... PS3 lets you pick from the fonts currently on your system.

Newsletter 65

Newsletter #65 is about text in PhotoStory 3, externally applied to a picture before importing, or internally during project editing. Click the image to read it.

Here's a Sample Text Clip to demo an effect you can't do with text in Movie Maker 2, scolling text diagonally. It's 640x480 and 3.3 MB in file size, with a playing time of 1:18.

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Adding Titles

Add text to any picture in your story. The text will be positioned as you see it and go into the black borders if you have any, like I do with this map image... and it sticks to the picture so, when you add panning or zooming motion later, it'll pan/zoom the text too.

Add Titles

You can also select or change the special effect on this working window... sometimes the interactions between text and effect are such that you change your mind about the effect you chose before, so having the option here lets you easily change your mind.

Interactively play with the overall visual effects and the font type and color. The effects are: Black and White, Chalk and Charcoal, Colored Pencil, Diffuse Glow, Negative, Outline in Black, Outline in Grey, Sepia, Washout, and Water Color.

Titles - Fonts

Fonts... Pressing the Font... icon to the upper left of the text box gets you this standard Windows font selection window. You're probably familiar with it from using other software.

The font style you use is important. It's good to know your fonts before working with them here, so you don't have to go through them one at time at this point... have a font-study session and keep a list of your favorites handy. The utility I use is Font Viewer, a free download from PC Magazine.

  • Your choices are applied to all of the text on the selected picture. If your know your font name (like I use Verdana for my website pages), it's easy to go right to it... I type the letter 'V' into the font entry field and it goes right to it, at least to the beginning of the V section.

  • If you don't see the font size in the pick list, type it into the entry field. You can use any number from a tiny font size of 1 to a tremendously large 99,999.... have fun with fonts.... try the Webdings font at a size of 275, and enter just a lower-case b as the text entry.... center justified both horizontal and vertical.

  • ...you don't get to set text transparency as you do in Movie Maker 2, and you don't have an option for text animations. But you saw in the example at the top of this page how powerful the effects can be when using the panning and zooming of Photo Story 3 with text.

  • ... if you skipped over the link to the sample clip, go back and look at it. The second part of the clip, the map, drives home the fact that the applied text is pasted on the image so any motion effects apply to the picture and the text together. As I did the clip, I changed my mind about an effect on the map, adding the Sepia tone so the map would appear older and the text bolder.