When you are editing a photograph of your dog or putting together a humorous slide for a digital presentation, you often want to overlay a cartoonish speech bubble onto the image. You do not need to download a massive, professional illustration suite like Adobe Illustrator to do this. The macOS Preview application contains a fully featured vector drawing engine hidden inside its markup tools, allowing you to instantly drop highly customizable speech bubbles and comic text boxes directly onto any image file.
How to Access the Shapes Menu
The vector shapes tool is hidden by default to keep the application interface looking clean when you are simply reading PDF documents.
- Double-click the image file (JPEG, PNG, etc.) to open it in Preview.
- Look at the top-right corner of the window. Click the Show Markup Toolbar button (the icon shaped like the tip of a pencil).
- A new horizontal toolbar will slide down from the top of the window.
- Click the Shapes icon (it looks like a square layered directly on top of a circle).
A drop-down menu will appear featuring a variety of geometric shapes, including arrows, stars, and polygons. Click the Speech Bubble icon located in the middle of the menu.
Customizing the Speech Bubble
A vector speech bubble will instantly drop into the exact center of your image. Because it is a vector shape, you can manipulate it without any loss of quality.
- Resizing: Click and drag the blue dots (handles) located on the corners of the box to make the bubble larger or smaller.
- Moving the Tail: Look for the small, bright green dot located at the very tip of the speech bubble’s “tail”. Click and drag this green dot to point the tail precisely at the mouth of the person or animal in the photograph.
- Changing Colors: With the bubble selected, look at the Markup Toolbar at the top of the screen. Click the Fill Color icon (a box with color pouring out of it) to change the inside of the bubble to solid white. Click the Border Color icon (a hollow box) to change the outline to thick black.
Adding Text Inside the Bubble
The vector shape is designed to hold text, but you cannot simply type directly onto the canvas.
- Look at the Markup Toolbar and click the Text icon (a square containing a capital letter ‘A’).
- A small text box containing the word “Text” will appear in the middle of the screen.
- Double-click the word “Text” and type your custom joke or phrase.
- Click and drag the text box until it sits perfectly centered inside your white speech bubble.
To change the font to something more comic-book appropriate (like “Marker Felt” or “Comic Sans”), highlight your text, click the Text Style icon (an italicized ‘A’ icon on the toolbar), and select a new font from the drop-down typography menu. When you are finished, press Command + S to permanently save the image.