Justin Odisho: How to Create a Handwritten Title Text Effect in Adobe Premiere Pro

Learn how to create a unique handwritten text title in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017 with this tutorial. —Justin Odisho

Learn how to create handwritten text on your video in Premiere Pro. This is not a font—it's your actual handwriting! In this tutorial, Justin Odisho teaches how to capture your handwriting and composite it on your footage in Premiere Pro.

First, write your text with a black marker on a white piece of paper, as Justin demonstrates at 0:08. Then, take a picture of your text and import the photo into Premiere Pro. At 1:04 Justin cleans up with photo by drawing a mask around the text, eliminating all unwanted areas of the paper. 

The next step is critical. At 1:29, Justin says to apply specific blend modes depending on what you want the final text to look like. Choose Multiply if want the text to remain black; choose Screen if you want to change the text to white. In either case, the blend mode is used to make the paper transparent and only the text visible.

In this example, Justin wants white text. So at 1:53 he shows how to invert the RGB curve (or luma curve) in the Lumetri Color panel; he sets the black point to white and the white point to black. This changes the black text to white, but still leaves some of the paper behind. Justin finesses the RGB curve into an S-shape which increases the contrast and eliminates the remaining paper.

Going further, Justin shows how to add a custom color to the handwritten text at 3:10. To do this, add a color matte under the text and apply the Track Matte Key effect to the text clip. Select the appropriate Matte track in the Effect Controls so the text reveals the color underneath it. From here you can nest the text and the color matte and apply transitions to your handwritten text.