How do I colour in different words with different colours in 1 text box?

[ajs]

I really don't understand how you can't just drag your cursor across text to select it then do whatever you want to do with that text you highlighted. I want to colour in a word red then another one green but I just can't figure out how??

[Pixey]

Hello @ajs and welcome

 

Paint.net is all about layers.

If you 'select' inside the text, in global mode, you can select all of the text.

Make a new layer and add the new color.

 

Or a single letter using the paintbrush:

 

 

[MJW]

13 hours ago, ajs said:

I really don't understand how you can't just drag your cursor across text to select it then do whatever you want to do with that text you highlighted.

 

Well, you can in the same way you can modify other pixels; but you can't treat the text specially as text once you click Finish or perform some other operation that Finishes the text, such as beginning a new text string. When a text string is Finished, it's converted to pixels just like any other pixels in an image; there's no way to convert it back into text.

 

Having text remain text would add a great deal of complexity. Even the everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink Photoshop only preserves the text identity for text in Type layers and Special Object layers. Text in Photoshop Image layers is not editable as text. In Paint.NET, all layers are Image layers.

 

If you have text in a separate transparent layer (where text should nearly always be), you can change the color of one section by selecting it and and changing the pixel color, by, for instance, using Hue/Saturation or Red ochre's Object2colour.

 

[AndrewDavid]

@ajs Do you mean like this?

[IHaveNoName]

By chance I've been dealing with same problem myself only a few hours ago and it is a bit of a faff because, for example, you can't change the text colour to highlight a word when a particular bank of text still has the active text cursor.

 

If you change the colour all the active text is recoloured too.

 

If you create a new layer or put a select box around the word in question so that you can recolour it or type in a different font or colour the text cursor is cancelled and you'll have to re-select it and realign it later. That's not always easy.

 

What I usually do (and was doing earlier) is once the (separate) text layer is finished in my primary (black) colour choice I copy it into another layer or layers and recolour each one in full, to for example red text and another with green text. The layers are aligned so 'all' you need to do is remove everything but the red and green letters/words/sentences you want to insert into the original layer from their respective layers.

 

You then go down to that original black text layer and erase those same letters/words/sentences. Once done simply merge the red and green text layers down and you'll have a single text layer with the inserted, coloured content all perfectly aligned.

 

It is still a hassle but I can't think of a better way of doing it without having to type each piece of text in a different colour in the same layer and moving it around, aligning everything manually. 

 

 

[MJW]

2 hours ago, IHaveNoName said:

What I usually do (and was doing earlier) is once the (separate) text layer is finished in my primary (black) colour choice I copy it into another layer or layers and recolour each one in full, to for example red text and another with green text.

 

It seems simpler to me to type in all the text in a single color, then individually make selections around the text you want to recolor, and recolor them.

[IHaveNoName]

TBH I'm not a big fan of recolouring text in any circumstances, particularly small, elaborate fonts with swirls/serifs. Even when adjusting the tolerance if you compare a black original text word recoloured to, for example, red against the same word typed in directly in red, the recoloured version is very obvious.

 

The technique I suggested isn't any different really, depending on how you recolour.

 

If the text is a strong colour rather than black I've found with text in particular you get slightly better results using hue or colour balance tools for the recolouring instead of the dedicated recolouring plugins.

 

However the technique described was for changing dozens of words scattered about a block of text, the task I was doing. I just find it easier and quicker to recolour a whole layer of copied text and erase the larger areas of text I didn't want to change rather than having to go around selecting each word and recolouring them individually.

 

However if it is just one or two words then, yes I agree selecting the words and recolouring them individually is the more sensible solution.

 

 

[MJW]

8 hours ago, IHaveNoName said:

I'm not a big fan of recolouring text in any circumstances, particularly small, elaborate fonts with swirls/serifs. Even when adjusting the tolerance if you compare a black original text word recoloured to, for example, red against the same word typed in directly in red, the recoloured version is very obvious.

 

Using the Magic Wand to select the text, then filling is not, to put it mildly, the ideal approach. Using Red ochre's Object2colour plugin for text on a transparent background will do a much, much better job. The recolored text will look great, swirls, serifs, and all. For those who for some reason don't want to use a plugin, type the text in a saturated color, such as blue, then change the color with the built-in Hue/Saturation adjustment. It's a little harder to get an exact color, but any color should be obtainable. (To get an exact color, one could, I suppose, put the desired color in a lower layer and then adjust the color of the text until it disappears against the background.)

 

The Magic Wand has its uses, but if the task requires any subtly, it's probably not one of them.

[IHaveNoName]

I rarely use the Magic Wand unless the text happen to be large and blocky. Anything 'fussy' like a fancy font and you know you're going to have to reset the tolerance very precisely just to get it to select the finer detail. 

 

Normally I go to the Color > Recolour Choice plugin which is set up to use Primary and Secondary colour choices by default.

[MJW]

1 hour ago, IHaveNoName said:

Anything 'fussy' like a fancy font and you know you're going to have to reset the tolerance very precisely just to get it to select the finer detail. 

 

The tolerance is only part of the problem.  Pixels are either selected or not selected by the Magic Wand -- there's no antialiasing. So a partially-opaque pixel will be either selected and opaquely filled with the new color, or not selected and left the original color. That results in, among other problems, jagged edges.

 

I've never used Color > Recolour Choice, but expect it would do a good job of changing the color while leaving the opacity the same, which is exactly what's needed.

[Ego Eram Reputo]

No one has suggested the Recoloring Tool yet. I'd have thought it the perfect tool for recoloring text.

[IHaveNoName]

You mean the Manual Color tool?

 

I've had issues with that and just checked and it still seems to be the case that by default it appears to use Add rather than replacing the colour.

 

I just tried it on black text recolouring to red RGB 255/0/0 and the result is very different from using the selected text colour red RGB 255/0/0 directly. Perhaps I've been using some incorrect setting with the Manual Recolour tool.

[ardneh]

The problem I have with the Recolor tool is that any antialiasing will retain some of the original color.
 

[Ego Eram Reputo]

13 hours ago, ardneh said:

The problem I have with the Recolor tool is that any antialiasing will retain some of the original color.
 

 

Adjust the tolerance?

 

Black text on it's own layer. Recolored with the Recoloring tool....

 

[ardneh]

I mean this:

[MJW]

3 hours ago, Ego Eram Reputo said:

Adjust the tolerance?

 

I was going to mention Recolor, but after trying a number of settings and tolerances, never found anything that worked perfectly. All your examples look slightly wonky at the edges to my eye (though the blue one is mostly unobjectionable, and only the x in "text" has obvious problems).

[Ego Eram Reputo]

I see what you mean. I tried again with white text to see if that was the same. It is

[Djisves]

On 4/13/2022 at 1:41 AM, MJW said:

 

... Red ochre's Object2colour.

 

 

On 4/14/2022 at 3:30 AM, IHaveNoName said:

...Normally I go to the Color > Recolour Choice plugin which is set up to use Primary and Secondary colour choices by default.

 

There's 3 plugins I use often to recolour objects and selections. The two above and, more often, Advanced Color Replacement by @silverhammer.

I thought I'd bring it to the attention of anyone interested.