Adding and Formatting Text Overlays

What You’ll Learn

You’ll master the complete process of inserting text elements into your CapCut videos and customizing their appearance through color, font selection, and positioning. This skill is essential for creating professional tutorial videos where on-screen text guides viewers through each step of your instruction, dramatically improving content clarity and viewer engagement.

Key Concepts

Text overlays in CapCut function as independent layers that sit above your video footage, allowing you to annotate, label, or highlight specific elements without modifying the underlying video. Understanding text layer hierarchy, anchor points, and the distinction between text properties (color, size, opacity) and effects (shadows, outlines, glows) enables you to create visually coherent tutorial content. The text tool integrates seamlessly with CapCut’s timeline, letting you control exact timing for when overlays appear and disappear during your tutorial segments.

• Accessing the Text Tool: Tap the “Text” button in the bottom toolbar of the editing interface, which opens the default text menu where you can select from basic text, subtitles, or caption styles. CapCut automatically creates a new text layer and places it on your timeline at the playhead’s current position.
• Positioning and Sizing Text: After adding text, you can drag it anywhere on the canvas using your finger or mouse, and pinch-to-zoom or use the corner handles to resize the text box to fit your composition. The position locks in once you tap elsewhere, and you can return to adjust it by selecting the text layer again from the timeline.
• Adjusting Text Color and Opacity: Select your text layer and tap the color picker icon to choose from preset colors or create custom RGB values using the color wheel; opacity adjustments allow text to blend with background elements. This is particularly useful in tutorial videos where you want text to remain readable but not overwhelm the instructional footage beneath it.
• Text Alignment and Formatting Options: Use the alignment buttons to position text as left-aligned, center-aligned, or right-aligned within its bounding box, and adjust line spacing, letter spacing, and text shadow depth through the formatting panel. These granular controls ensure your tutorial text maintains professional presentation standards across different screen sizes.

Practical Application

Open a sample tutorial video in CapCut and add three text overlays that label different elements of your screen—for example, “Click Here,” “Menu Button,” and “Export Settings”—positioning each one directly over its corresponding area. Adjust the color of each text element to contrast with its background, set the opacity to 85%, and verify that all three overlays appear simultaneously during a single 3-second segment of your timeline.