Is there such a thing as a customizable photo to text plugin?

[Dabbly]

Hi all, I'm 100% new to the forums and 99.9% new to paint.net and this kind of design...

I made some strides with it almost a year ago and am now getting back into the program for a very specific reason-

I want to create word pictures!

However, in all the software I've been able to dredge up, including a photo-to-text converter, there is no way(that I have found)

to make text conform to the outlines or silhouette of a photo or portrait. The P-T-T program turns everything into gobbledegook

which is feasibly editable, but would be a huge pain to customize. Also, it covers the entire canvas in order to create the "texture",

when all I need is to have words in the shape of a recognizable object or figure. I tried to find a link to one particular artist, but couldn't : (

the art might be of a dining room where everything is drawn from the words describing them, ex. "tabletabletabletable", etc...

So basically I think of it as being something where the plugin creates a line conforming to the shape of the photo (easy)

and then provides a reticle based starting point + directional/typesize control that both hugs the existing line and creates another line around it, (hard?)

so that words can be bunched together in any manner one chooses, enabling photos that can describe themselves. (awesome!)

Has this been done already and I'm late to the party? It seems vaguely doable via meticulous photoshop/paint.net twiddling, but then you're talking

hours and hours of work for a single photo, which seems like a huge stumbling block. And of course there's silhouetting the picture, printing it, and then hand-drawing

the words into the empty form(or doing the whole thing from scratch), but my lettering is not nearly as good as selectable fonts, and if you screw up it's a pain.

HELP?!

And thanks in advance for any ideas related to this, or alternative typography. You guys/girls do great work, and I hope to have something to contribute eventually.

Check out Chronotext for some similar concepts to this, it's just cool stuff in general.

Cheers,

James

[jim100361]

Let me see if I understand this correctly.

You have a picture of a couch. But instead of it looking like a couch, you want it to "read" couch? And the word itself would form the couch's outline?

Is this correct?

If so, here's what I think you can do.

Essentially you mask the couch and instead of replacing the whole outline with the word, insert the letters themselves individually - each as a separate layer. With each layer you can then resize them so that they can be adjusted accordingly to fill the space. Also utilzing the liquify plugin you can then reshape each individual letter to "form" the outline.

The liquify plugin can be found here: http://forums.getpai...showtopic=20688

Or maybe you can do something similar to what is being done here:

http://forums.getpai...the-background/

Check out this video to see how you can "Shape" something to fit onto something else (Caution: Rated R - adult subject matter - supervision required):

Edited November 26, 2011 by jim100361