Creating type that inverts any background

In this exercise I will show you how to use the Difference Mode to create live editable text that inverts anything behind it, and this works for Line Art as well, anything that's white against the black background or just plain white and it's really a great trick. I'm working inside a file called Double model comp.psd, it's found inside the 07_inversion folder. And it's so called by the way, because I have two versions of this model, currently we are seeing the model 1 layer, but if I turn on the model 2 layer, you can see we've got another shot of the same model far in the foreground and she's covering up the background image, because she has this white background.

That's rude in everything, but it's not a problem at all, and we can test that that background is white, by selecting a Magic Wand tool making sure that the Tolerance values is set to 0, Anti- alias is off, Contiguous is turned on, problem is that I have the wrong layer selected. So I will go ahead and click on model 2, and now I'll click in the background and you can see that we've got this huge area of white. And if I want to test that it's white, then I press the I key switch to the eyedropper and just go ahead and click some place inside that background, test the color up here in the Color panel, sure enough we've got white, because the Saturation value is set to 0 and the Brightness value is set to 100%.

So let's make that white disappear, not by masking of course, press Ctrl+D or Command+D on Mac to deselect the image. All we need to do is press Shift+Alt+M or Shift+Option+M on the Mac to switch to the Multiply mode, and that white background disappears. So that's step one. Step two is to integrate the text. So I am going to go ahead and turn that text layer on. and then click on it to make it active. Now I've rasterized this text, because I was using a few fonts that are on my system. probably aren't on yours. But this trick would work just as well for live editable text.

Now I am going to press the D key in order to reinstate the default colors of black-and-white, and I will press the M key to switch back to the Rectangle Marquee tool and then I am going to fill this text with white by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Backspace, that would be Command+Shift+Delete on the Mac. The ideas is that Ctrl+Backspace or Command+Delete goes ahead and fills the layer with the background color, because we have the Shift key down as well, irrespective of the transparency, so the letters remain intact.

The great thing you may recall about the Difference mode is that anything that's white on the active layer, inverts entirely. So it automatically inverts anything behind it, which means that we can change the mode from Normal to difference to achieve this effect right here. And now if I press the Ctrl key or the Command key on the Mac to get the Move tool on the fly and drag this text elsewhere inside the image, it is going to continuously invert everything behind it.

And as I say, this works with live editable text, so you can turn around and edit the text anytime you like. It also works with Line Art as long as a Line Art is white, against the black background. All right, I am going to press Ctrl+Z or Command+Z on the Mac, to undo that movement. We do have what I consider to be an aesthetic problem however, even though I like the fact that we have this black text against the white background, I don't want the text that overlaps the models to turn blue, because its inverting those warm skin tones. Instead, I'd like those areas of the text to turn white, and I'll show you how to make that happen in the next exercise.