Increasing the Thickness of Fonts

You may love a certain font, but it may be too thin for the purpose that you have in mind (ex. for cutting it with your digital cutter machine). If you want to make your letters thicker using Photoshop, follow these steps:

1. Open a New Document, Letter size, 300 ppi and Transparent Background.
2. Make sure your Foreground color is set to black. Using the Type tool, type your title. Set your font size to 100 pt approximatly.
3. On the Layers palette, press the Ctrl key and at the same time click on the layer that has your text.  Your text is now selected.
4. Now, right click on the Type layer and select Rasterize Layer.
5. On the menu bar, choose Select, Modify, Expand.
6. Now you can type the number of pixels with which you want to expand your letters. Try Expand by: 10 pixels.
7. Press Alt+Backspace and the selection is going to be filled with black.
8. Deselect the type by pressing Ctrl+D.
9. On the menu bar, choose Image, Trim. Your document will be the size of the title.
10. Save your title.

If you want to use this title just for printing, you’re finished at this stage. If you want to make an outline for cutting it with your digital cutting machine, like the Silhouette, continue with the following steps:

1. Save the image with another name if you plan to use the original for printing.  Use a .jpeg or .bmp extension to make it available for the ROBO Craft program.
2. Open your ROBO program. Create a New Document. From the menu bar, choose Insert, File. Look for your document and click OK. Now you are going to see a blue box; make a click inside the document and you will see the title that you created in Photoshop. Once your title is in the blank document, click on the Get Outline icon.  Select the Outer Frame Only from the new window if you want only the outline of the letters (you are not going to include the inside cut of the Os for example). Click on Convert to Outline and then click on Paste then Exit.
3. Now you have an outline that you can cut with the Silhouette.
4. Save the file using the extension .gsd.

Enjoy cutting your own titles.

Tags: making fonts thicker for cutting, photoshop tutorials, Quickutz Silhouette