Blend Text Over a Photo? (Hint: Blend Modes)

If you use blend modes in Photoshop, you’ll love InDesign’s Effects panel (Window > Effects). In the pop-up menu in the top-left corner of the panel, you’ll find most of the same blend modes that are available in Photoshop. This is especially useful if you’d like to blend text over a photo. Simply position your text over your image, select the text frame, and then go to the Effects panel and choose a blend mode from the pop-up menu—that’s it! You can adjust the opacity before or after applying the blend mode by opening the Opacity pop-up menu near the top-right corner of the panel and adjusting the slider. Not only that, but once you have applied a blend mode, you can still add an additional effect by opening the panel menu, selecting Effects, and choosing an appropriate effect. The example above has four versions of the word “DESIGN,” each with a different blend mode applied to show how it reacts with the image below. The blend modes shown are as follows (from top to bottom): Multiply, Overlay, Color Dodge, and Color. You can play around with different blend modes to get the best effect depending on the color of your text and the image you’ve used.

(For this example, I used the font DDC Hardware available from https://www.fontseed.com/fonts/ddc-hardware. Personal and commercial licenses are available. DDC Hardware is dedicated to Aaron’s dad, James Patrick Draplin, 1943–2013.)