An Experimental Life

Note that while I’ve only used this exact method in Photoshop 7 through CS2, it should work in many older versions, and I believe it should work in Gimp, and in the Elements and LE distributions of Photoshop commonly included with many scanners, etc. This tutorial assumes you are already familiar with Photoshop.

1. Create a new layer and name it “balloons.”
2. Double-click on the new layer in your layers pallete and select stroke from layer effects. Set the stroke color to whatever color you want the outline of your word balloons to be (usually black), and the line width to, say, 12 pixels or something if you’re working at 600 dpi (which you should be, even though the uploaded version will be 72 dpi).
3. Move the layer so that it is in between your art layer( and your dialogue layer( if it isn’t already there. Duplicate the layer if you want to have overlapping balloons.
4. Select whatever marque shape you want (usually elliptical) and select the area you want your word balloon to be in. Reposition if necessary.
5. Fill the shape with whatever color you want—usually white. We’ll worry about the tails in a bit. Repeat this step as necessary.
6. Select one of the lasso tools (I use the Polygonal Lasso tool--Select it by clicking and holding on the Lasso tool until the variation pop up) and draw in your word balloon tail for the first word balloon and fill with white.
7. Lather, rinse, and repeat as necessary.

For square word balloons with rounded corners, play around with the feathering setting with the square marque tool, or use ImageReady.

(Additional material from Jungmin Escobar) For an interesting effect, you can make your balloons larger than the current comic panel and crop the edges off of the rounded balloon so that it is conformed within the panel. Also you can change the opacity of the solid white background of the balloon and let it fade into the background a little for a cool effect. I like to draw the tails of my balloons with the pen tool and then turn the path into a selection and stroke it.