Adding jitter to text in Photoshop

Or, just do a line of text like in the above examples and use the text replacement on a per-name basis. As Nathan pointed out, each person's name is a different length, so the characters would appear slightly differently displaced for each person.

kirk

Followup, part the first: Type along a path worked really well, I was able to knock out eight cards in about an hour last night, including a fix for a spelling error. They're printed, we're doing the shoot tonight and I'll post results once they're processed. Thanks!

Nice, can't wait to see them!

Those look great!

Thanks! The girls are pretty happy with them too.

The whole thing is terrific! Excellent job.

kirk

So basically you printed these out with the borders and lines, and mounted them to foamboard, I assume?

Yep. I sized the file to print two cards on one letter-sized paper, glued them to foamcore, and cut them out.
[actually, Lady Licorice helped with the cutting while I was setting up the light, and she didn't use a straightedge or a fresh blade, grrrr]

I used the same exact type path for every line of text (except the "AS"). As I hoped, the different spacing/kerning made them all crooked in different ways. In many cases, the crooked path made the letters fall over too far sideways, but slight adjustments to the kerning made them pop back upright again. WAY faster than rasterizing the text and selecting/moving each letter individually.

I made the drop shadow on the type in such a way that would agree with my planned size/position of the light. (A "real" mugshot would have much harder shadows, of course, but I still wanted these to be a little soft to minimize skin imperfections.)

The original backdrop was the last bits of my 53" white paper roll, then I found a free dirty-concrete texture, blurred it and dropped it into the background. I set the blend mode to Multiply so that my masking didn't have to be super precise.

The badge on Madame Mumsie is 'shopped in, and the shot of Kioymi Pearl is a composite of two images - on the one with the face we liked, she was holding the card way out toward the camera and it was out of focus. Probably should have done the same with Lola LaRue, hers is a little blurry.

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/FhKd​Er

It's a good thing to learn something new and be able to use it right out the gate, those are very nice. Certainly something we could leverage with school plays should my daughter decide she wants to go into drama.