Adobe Fireworks CS4 offers interface enhancements that facilitate fluid work flows. With the help of Fireworks, you can make complex website designs for various media like desktop, web, mobile and print devices. The alignment of items on the Fireworks page is very handy. New sluice types and typesetting capabilities makes the software extremely user-friendly.
The typesetting capabilities of Fireworks CS4 allow text wrapping around shapes and offers consistency with Illustrator and Photoshop. The editing of symbols in their places is also possible. With Fireworks, designs can be exported as PDF documents, web-enabled Adobe applications or as CSS layouts including external style sheets. The software offers a plethora of effects to enhance web designs, one of them being the text overlay effect.
Steps to blur image and blend text with it
The first step is to blur the image. After blurring the image, Overlay effects can be blended with it. The following are the steps adopted for blurring an image and blending text with it using overlay blend mode of Fireworks. First, make sure that the image, on which the overlay effect is to be applied, is of good quality and colors.
- Open the image you want to make as the background image on Adobe Fireworks CS4.
- Use ‘Zoom Blur’ tool in order to blur background image. Even though there are various kinds of blur tool, we make use of Zoom Blur in this tutorial. For this, select background image, then go to Filters. Choose Blur and then select Zoom Blur.
- On clicking on Zoom Blur option, a popup window will appear showing ‘Amount’ and Quality’ with default values. Set values for these entities as 30 and 20 respectively. This will blur the background image with a zoom effect. Now you can add the text overlay effect to this image.
- Use ‘Text Tool’ next. Type the required text above the background image.
- The text you just typed will now appear white in color in the image. The next step is to apply overlay effect to this text. This is done so that the text will blend with the color of background image and reflects the same color as that of the image.
- Now, select the text. You can observe that the Blend mode option available on right hand side of properties window has turned to ‘Normal’. On clicking over the arrow, many options will be available to you. Choose ‘Overlay’ effects.
Any of the other effects can also be chosen to get the corresponding effect. You have now successfully applied the text overlay effect on the image.
- Other images can be used to get different text overlay effect. It is preferable to choose good quality colorful pictures so as to get great text overlay effect.
The text overlay effect works well when blended with blurred images. However it can be used in normal images as well, resembling a watermark. The text overlay effect effectively blends the text with the background color in the image, and then reflect that same color in the text as well. You should also make sure that good quality images are used. Adobe Fireworks offers several blur techniques for blurring the image.
You will also be able to select the amount of blur for the images. But for applying text overlay effect, the Zoom Blur option is more preferred. The software also comes with options for advanced text effects. Mastering the options and its uses can help you develop amazing overlay effects, rather than just blending a text with a blurred image.