Finally, its time to add the few pieces of text to the fuselages.

First lets do it on the second fuselage psd and transfer it to the first.

I purposely left this out of the scheme until now to allow you to have a little experience with aligning text after you have done the scheme. You may come across this situation when doing some repaints so its good have a go at it here. It also involves aligning text across two texture surfaces. Generally speaking, this detailing would be included in the layer folder dragging over stage.

Open the paint scheme layer folder, locate the real images you used in the early stages.

You want to reactivate the the mid section image, it contains most of the text we need to look at.

Duplicate this layer and deactivate the original.

You're going to need to drag the duplicated layer to the top and out of the layer folder, click and hold the button then drag upwards in the layer palette until right the top of it. This is so we have a good view of the image.

Increase the opacity back to 100%.

With the layer selected, flip it horizontally by going to Edit - Transform - Flip Horizontal. This is so the text is the correct way round.

Select the Font Tool (T). You need it selected to Horizontal Type Tool, if it isn't click and hold on it then select from the list.

Set the active colour to white by clicking on the colour in the tool bar and selecting white from the chart.

Click in the area by the "www.MyTravel.com" text, you should see a new text layer created in the layer palette.

Regardless of the font, type "www.MyTravel.com". The text layer should automatically rename to what you type, don't worry if it doesn't.

Now highlight the text by having the Font Tool (T) selected then placing the cursor up close to a letter. The cursor should display a vertical line. Click and hold then drag over all of the text.

Click at the top under the menu bar where a drop down is indicated to listing the fonts.

Using just by clicking each one or by using the up and down arrow keys, select the closest looking font.

I chose Arial with Bold Italic and a Size of 26pt

Its not 100% accurate but its pretty close and suffices for what we are doing.

We no longer need the real image, so that can now be deleted

Open the "Paint scheme" layer folder again and reactivate the original real images. You want the middle and rear image layers.

With your font layer selected, select the Move Tool (V).

You're going to need to flip the text, go to Edit - Transform - Flip Horizontal.

Click on the piece of text now and move it so it covers the text on one of real images.

Duplicate the font layer and move the duplicated layer to the other fuselage piece, covering the real image text.

We no longer need the real image layers so deactivate them, they may needed later

Your two pieces of text should look something like this:

You'll notice from the real images there's one final thing we need, the registration. The font typically used is Amarillo USAF (available here), place it in your Windows - Font folder.

You'll see from the images the registration is at the rear of the aircraft, using the Font Tool (T) click near that area. Type "G CCMY", you're probably wondering why no hyphen. This particular font doesn't have a hyphen so we'll use another font for that

Deactivate the real image layer to properly see the result.

To ease of use instead of having two fonts in one layer (as well as possible size changes), we'll have a font layer just for the hyphen.

Click the layer below the font layer, this will allow you to add another font layer.

Click the area around the reg once more and type a hyphen.

Highlight the hyphen (like we did with the MyTravel text) and change the font to arial.

Select the Move Tool (V) and click then drag the hyphen so it sits nicely in the space between the letters. You may need to squash the hyphen to be the correct size, go to Transform - Edit - Scale and click the middle side on one side then drag it inwards until you're happy with the result. Select the Move Tool (V) again and accept the changes.

Holding crtl, click on the reg font layer (to select both of the layers) and link the two together using the "Link Layers" button at the bottom of the palette, now flip both of the them together by going to Edit - Transform - Flip Horizontal.

Save the psd and check her out in flight sim.

We're expecting nothing much to be wrong with the reg, however it is highly likely the "www.MyTravel.com" text will require adjustment.

As we can see in this image to align the text properly we need to move up the text on the mid section and move it further away.

So I'll estimate that we need to move it up by 4 pixels and move it away by 30.

Now the text is a little too high and far away, so I'll move it down by 2 pixels and pull it inwards by 15 pixels.

Keep at this process until the text is looking good, with experience you'll be better at estimating the amount of pixels required to move it by. A good tip is to look at the panel lines going around the nearby area, they are usually 1 pixel thick and help with estimating the amount.

The text is nice and lined up now, so we'll move on.

Create a new layer folder and name it "Text" by doubling click on the name in the layers palette.

Click on one of the text layers and hold down Crtl.

Click on the rest of the text layers to select them all.

Now click on one and drag them in to the layer folder.

Use the Line Tool (U) and make another reference cross and have it inside the "Text" layer folder.

Close the "Text" layer folder, over lap the document with the other fuselage psd. Just like before, click on the layer folder once and drag it over to the other psd.

With the "Text" layer folder still selected, we need to use the Move Tool (V) to move the reference cross in to the correct position. Use the arrow keys to do fine adjustments.

It is important to be aware that not all mapping on aircraft is as accurate and it may be a ball park placement requiring movement to be correct. It gives us a good base to start from however.

You can now deactivate the reference cross.

We're going to need to flip all of this text as it needs to be the other way around.

Instead of flipping the layer folder we'll need to flip each individual layer otherwise it will flip them in relation to all of the text layers, this will result in an inverting, placing them on the other side of the psd. Try flipping the layer folder horizontally to see what happens, remember to undo it afterwards.

As the reg text layers are lined there are 3 pieces you need to flip. Open the "Text" layer folder and click on the first layer, go to Edit - Transform - Flip Horizontal. Then work your way through the other two, remembering that the 2 reg layers are linked.

Your text should now look like this:

Save the psd and check her out in flight sim.

Thankfully the text is correctly positioned across the two fuselage sections

It also looks nicely aligned with the other side.

If for any reason the text isn't, repeat the steps like we did when doing the first "www.MyTravel.com" text.

You'll be pleased to know, that's pretty much it for alignment problems.