Word Balloons using PS 7 Shapes

Here's a walkthrough about using a combination of shapes, layer styles, and masks I
used to add those word balloons. If you don't have Illustrator this is a decent alternative
quite adequate for webcomics.

First a bit about the setting up your new shape layer:

Basic Balloons can be made using the presets.  For the balloon in the corner - 3rd panel..that was done freehand with the
pen tool. Not the pen with the squiggle line..just the basic pen tool itself. For corner snugs like that it's often easier to do them by hand.

If you hold down the shift key while dragging they'll stay straight up. Another tip is if you want the handles to be independant
of each other - like for inside angles, you can do that by clicking the pen tools flyout triangle pen on the floating tool bar . The
'angle' icon is the one to choose. If you click on a handle with it, it'll move freely without affecting the other. If you click on an
anchor point then the handles disappear. 

Here's where it starts looking nice. For a sharper look choose INSIDE for the position. If you need to mask
it will also simplify things....you'll see later. I chose CENTER because inside was just too hard looking with your
comic style.  Another cool thing is strokes don't have to be solid. Patterns and gradients work too. 

Here's the settings for layer masking . Anywhere a balloon overlaps something it shouldn't you'll have to use
masking. You CANNOT erase in a shapes layer. Masks are nicer anyhow since nothing gets deleted
permanently. This is the only way I could recreate the back and forth balloon treatments in the original comic.
They needed to be on 2 layers because anything touching on a single layer, melds. Note that you won't see
'red' when painting in your mask..I used channels to make it visible so you could see extactly what bits were
masked out on the top balloon layer ( shown here in yellow for clarity).

And here's the steps:

And that's pretty much it. For the guy in bottom panel I painting freehand in the mask to put the balloon behind his hat. An alternative to this is
wanding the black ink lines in the drawing layer and painting inside that selection to get a more precise fit to the line.