Text shadows, a quick tutorial
One problem with the typical "photo with text pasted on" icons is that the text is often hard to read. At 100x100 pixels, there's not a great deal of space for text, and often the text must be placed so that it covers various shades and hues in the underlying photo. Since at one point the background might be white, at another blue, and yet another black; there's no one colour for the text that fits all and contrasts sharply everywhere.
A quick and easy way to make the text more legible is to add a shadow behind it. Here's one way to do it (the particulars are for the image manipulation program GIMP but the same thing can be done in Photoshop.)
We start with a photo of Professor Lupin in Lego:
Ontop of this, we place some nice, bold red text:
We can make out what it says, mostly because with only four letters in each words we could use a decently sized font. However, it's not easy on the eyes, so we'll add a shadow.
1. Open the Layers dialogue (ctrl+L or right click and select Dialogs -> Layers) Note that we have two layers, one with the background photo (appropriately enough named "Background") and one text layer with the text.
2. Make a new layer (click on the "New Layer" icon at the bottom left of the Layer dialogue.) Choose "Transparent" as the layer fill type and click OK.
3. Move the new layer between the background and the text Select the new layer by clicking on it and use the up and down buttons on the layers dialogue to move it into position between the two other layers.
4. Select the text layer
5. Make a selection of the letters Choose "Select by Color" from the toolbox, and adjust the tools' "Threshold" value to about 50. Click on some of the red text. You should have"marching ants" around all the letters.
6. Expand and feather the selection Right click and choose "Select -> Grow" and choose "1" as the number of pixels to grow the selection with. Next, right click and cohose "Select -> Feather" and choose 3 as the number of pixels to feather with. (Feathering makes the edges of the shadow rounder and less sharp.)
7. Add the shadow Select the new layer you created earlier. Choose black as the foreground colour. Choose "Bucket fill" from the toolbox, and set Affected Area to "Fill whole selection." Now left-click on the image, somewhere inside the selection to fill the entire selection with black.
8. Appreciate the difference:
Of course, black isn't the only colour you can use for shadows. If you're using dark colours for the text, it can be better to use white or a pastel instead. Black can also look a bit stark, and it can often be better to take a dark colour from the picture instead. Here's a variant where I've used a dark green taken from Lupin's upper arm for the shadow, rather than black:
There are many other ways you can set out text and make it more legible, of course, but this one is quick and easy, and works quite well for small text sizes.