How to Outline Text in GIMP

If you were around for the earliest days of internet memes, you might remember that they often used a classic outlined text style. It made your text stand out clearly no matter what was going on in the rest of the image, and it was easy enough to use for online meme generator websites. 

Of course, that’s not the only great use for outlined text. The process is pretty simple, and you can use it for all kinds of design work from watermarks to website headers. Here’s the quick and easy guide on how to outline text in GIMP in just a few simple steps:

• Step 1: Create your text object with the Text tool.
• Step 2: Hold Alt and click on your text layer’s icon in the Layers palette to select the text outlines.
• Step 3: Open the Select menu and use the Grow tool to set the width of the outline.
• Step 4: Create a new layer below your text layer, fill the expanded selection, and you’re done! 

If that was a bit too rushed for you, we’ll dig into each step a bit further below as we explore the different options you run into along the way and how you can use each one to create a different text outline in GIMP. 

Step 1: Create Your Text

Using the Text tool, add the text that you want to outline. GIMP’s text tools can be a bit finicky in my experience, so don’t feel bad if it takes you a few minutes and a bit of frustration to get things set up just right. Just breathe deeply and keep trying 😉 

Step 2: Create A Selection

Next, we need to select the text so that we can work around the edges of the letters. If you tried to do this by hand, it would take forever – and you probably would have pulled all your hair out long before you got close to finishing! It’s much easier to just let GIMP calculate it for you.

Your text has its own layer in the Layers palette at the bottom right of the GIMP interface (unless you’ve re-arranged the interface layout). Holding down the Alt key (Option on a Mac), click on the “A” icon for your text layer. Your text should now be outlined in the image window, shown below.

You can also right-click on the layer in the Layers palette and choose Alpha to Selection, which uses the layer’s transparency setting as a guide for creating the selection. Since text layers are transparent by default except for the actual letters themselves, we have a ready-made selection.

Now on to the outlining process!

Step 3: Adjust Your Outline

Now that you’ve got your text outlined with a selection marquee, you can start modifying it to get just the right outline shape. There are two main ways of dealing with this, depending on how precise you want your outlines to be.

The first method uses the Border tool that I mentioned in the quick and easy guide at the beginning of the post. Open the Select menu from the menu bar and choose Border. The Border Selection dialog box appears to let you customize the adjustments.

Border Selection works using your current selection edges as a center point, so a setting of 4 pixels (as shown above) would cover 2 pixels outside the edges of your letters and 2 pixels inside. Since we’re outlining text, I recommend setting the Border style to Hard to boost the clarity. 

The other method uses the Grow Selection tool, also found in the Select menu. This simply expands your text selection outwards by the set amount of pixels. 

Using the Border Selection method gives you a bit more flexibility, because there are times when you might want your outline to overlap your letterforms, but Grow Selection is a bit simpler for quick usage. There are also other ways to modify your selection’s edges to get different effects.

My previous selection, grown by 4 pixels using the Grow Selection tool

Step 4: Fill Your Outline On A New Layer

Once you’ve got your text outlined just the way you want, it’s time to fill it in with your outline of choice. We don’t want to paint over our text, though, so we need to create a new layer for our outline before we move on.

Open the Layer menu and choose New Layer. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + N (Command + Shift + N on macOS) or click the New Layer button at the bottom of the Layers palette. The default settings for a new layer should be fine to use.

With your new layer selected in the Layers palette, you can use any drawing or brush tool to fill in your selection, but the Bucket Fill tool is the simplest. Select Bucket Fill from the tool palette or hit Shift + B to switch to it, and click anywhere inside your selection area.

If your text is covered over by your fill, don’t worry – you can easily rearrange the order of your layers in the Layers palette. Drag and drop to change their order, or use the small arrow buttons at the bottom of the palette. That’s why we used a separate layer in the first place!

New layers are created above whichever layer you’ve got selected in the Layers palette, so you can save time by selecting the layer below your text layer before creating a new one in order to have to appear in the correct spot right away. 

Extra Credit Outlines

While you followed along with the steps earlier, you may have noticed that there are a bunch of different options in the Select menu. Now that you know the basics, you can start experimenting to see what other cool effects you can create!

Feather allows you to soften the edges of your selection so that when you fill it with your brush or bucket, the edges get softly blurred automatically. Remove holes lets you fill in the gaps in your letters (technically they’re called counters) like in the P, O, R, and A in my example above.

You can probably also start to think of other ways to combine your selections to create some really cool effects. Anything that modifies your selection boundaries is fair game, just remember to always add your fill on a separate layer from the actual text object.

That’s all there is to outline text in GIMP, so it’s time to get back into GIMP and start creating text outlines!

I’ve been working with digital images since the year 2000 or so, when I got my first digital camera. I've tried many image editing programs. GIMP is a free and powerful software, but not exactly user-friendly until you get comfortable with it, and I wanted to make the learning process easier for you here.