scrap pad

when putting text on a photo

for a quick and dirty improvement in readability/prettiness, you should put a small shadow around it to make the text edges look crisper. How I do this in Photoshop:

1. duplicate the text layer
2. make the text in the new layer black (for black text, I make the shadow one of the colors from the background)
3. rasterize the new text layer and move it behind the original text layer
4. do filter > blur > guassian blur. a 1-3 pixel blur should be plenty to make the letter edges sharper.
5. sometimes I reduce the opacity of the shadow layer.

example:

the second image has a black shadow on the white text and a pinkish shadow on the black text.