Making simple speech bubbles in Photoshop

Here's a short tutorial on how to do some fairly nicelooking normal speech bubbles in Photoshop quite quick and easy. This tutorial was done in Photoshop 6, but should be doable both in older and newer versions of Photoshop with a minimum of hassle.

First a quick rundown of the steps before I explain them in detail:
  1. Format and place your text on the screen
  2. Draw the bubble using the Ellipse tool (a Path tool) and adjust to fit around the text it if neccessary.
  3. Draw a triangle using the Polygon tool.
  4. Shape the triangle into a great-looking tail for the bubble.
  5. Merge the tail path with the bubble path.
  6. Render the finished speech bubble into a layer and add layer style to finish the job.
  7. Saving the speechbubble as a transparent GIF. (Optional step )

Sounds easy, huh? It is. The slightly tricky part can be reshaping the triangle to a decent tail - it can take a little getting used to the Paths tools in Photoshop if you've never worked with vector graphics and bezier curves before. But once you've got the hang of it, it's pretty easy.

Ready? Ok, let's get going!

Just add a normal text layer and input the text. I usually use centered text and if I have more than two lines of text in the bubble, I make the top and bottom lines a little shorter than the middle one(s) so it'll fit better into the oval shape of the bubble.

Now just roughly place the text where you want the bubble to go.


In this picture I used a white text color because it was more visible against the background image. When the speech bubble is in place and rendered I will change the text color to black.

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/RazorSharp 2003