I was working on a layout and I wanted to add a title to a polaroid frame.  I also wanted it to match my background paper.  And I wanted it to match fast.

I had just started my layout; I’m using a paper from Studio4 (from our retired Caleb charity collab); a polaroid frame (freebie available at the bottom of this post); and a photo of my cousin Heidi.  I am using Photoshop CS5, however this will work with other versions of Photoshop, as well as with Photoshop Elements.

In your layers panel,  make sure you are on the layer you will be editing.  In this case, I’m adding a title to my Polaroid Frame.

Next I click on my Tools Panel and I select my Text Tool, finally choosing the Horizontal Type Mask Tool:

Don’t panic!  Selecting this tool applies a temporary red mask to your layout as soon as you click to type your title.  I choose Fontmoochers from kevin {and} amanda. I love their fonts!

HINT: have your character panel set to “centered” to make aligning your text easy.

When you are finished click the bold check mark in your toolbar.  This removes the red layer mask & adds the font as marching ants to your Polaroid Frame layer.

I’m going for quick here, so I just hit Delete to cut the title out of my polaroid frame. This allows the background paper to shine through and easily matches my frame to my current layout.

I deselected (Ctrl+D) to remove the marching ants & admire my new title.

What’s really awesome is that I can change my mind, swap out my background paper, and my polaroid frame will still match my layout! Since I cut my title out of my frame, you can see it again without the background paper:

NOTE: I have a drop shadow applied so you can see the title better on the white background.

Using Photoshop’s Type Tool Mask is a great, quick, easy to cut quotes, titles & even shapes (using wingdings, webdings, etc.) out of papers, tags & frames.  Alternatively you can use it nondestructively to paste in pictures or papers.

NOTE: use command Paste Into(Alt+Shift+Ctrl V) to fill the “marching ants” on a brandnew, empty layer with any picture or paper.

You can download the polaroid frame freebie in this tutorial by CLICKING RIGHT HERE.