From the course: Type Tips

Knockout text

From the course: Type Tips

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Knockout text

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- [Nigel] Welcome to Type Tips. I'm Nigel French. In this episode, I'd like to show you how to create this knockout text effect. And I'm going to do the same effect in InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. In all cases, the text remains live and completely editable. So by knockout text I mean that I can move this frame around and wherever I position it, we'll see the image below. And also, as I mentioned, the text is completely editable. I'm going to come to the second page in my document, the starting point, and first of all, I'll select my white rectangle. Come to my Effects panel and change its Opacity to 85%. I'll then select the text frame and come and change it's Text Opacity to zero. Now I will select both of those rectangles, come to the Object menu and group them together. On your Effects panel, you may or may not see the option that we need next. If you don't, and I currently don't, come to the panel menu and choose Show Options, and it's this one Knockout Group. To achieve the effect in Illustrator, the process is the same. We are using the Transparency panel and we have the same option there to Knockout Group. In Photoshop, the steps are a little different. You can see how I have my Photoshop document set up. I have a group containing the text and the white rectangle, and at the bottom of my layer stack, the image. First of all, I'll select the rectangle layer. And as I did before, reduce its Opacity. I'll select my type and reduce its Fill Opacity. We have these two opacities here. The Opacity and the Fill Opacity. It's the Fill Opacity that needs to come down to zero. Then double-click to the right of the layer name and choose Knockout Shallow. Now, we have two types of Knockout: Shallow and Deep. Shallow gets us this effect. If I choose Deep, the Knockout will knock all the way through to transparency. That is, so long as the bottom layer in your layer stack is not a background layer. So that's how to achieve a knockout text effect in Photoshop, in Illustrator, and in InDesign.

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