Text Editing: Beyond Word Processors

As I promised, here are some tips on how to manipulate and fine-tune text. Photoshop offers some very high-tech options that far exceed ordinary programs' capabilities. I'll briefly cover how to warp your text, adjust spacing and other properties, and then discuss how to stylize text.

Warp

1. Warping is really simple. Just select the Type tool (keyboard shortcut--t) and go to the options toolbar at the top of the page. Just to the right of the color picker box you'll find the Warp icon. Clicking on it gives you many different styles of warpage (is that even a word?) and you can adjust the settings in the dialogue box.













2. When you select the text you'll notice that there's now a very wierd shaped text box.






3. Anyway, that's how to reshape your letters using the Warp command.

Spacing

1. This feature of Photoshop is really cool. Often, when you're dealing with a lot of text in graphic design you notice that some of the letters are too far apart, or the lines are getting crunched. To fix all this, just open the Character/Paragraph palette by clicking the button to the right of Warp. This dialogue box should appear.













2. You now have access to the font, properties, and spacing tools. On the first line, there's the font size, and to the right of that is the line spacing box. The second line contains tools for adjusting the spacing between 2 letters, and tracking. That's all we'll talk about right now. Say you have something like this:






3. The letters in "Manipulation" look really crunched. Solution: go to the Character palette, select the word and adjust the spacing between letters (in this case, bring it up to about 75). Or if your lines are way too close, like this.






4. Just use the line spacing option (use a number near the size of the font, in this case 50-60) and it's fixed.

5. One final note: try hovering your cursor over the icons next to each box in the Ch. palette. A little 2-way arrow appears. These are affectionately called "scrubby sliders." Just click and drag either way to adjust the number--a very nice feature. These are available most of the time in Photoshop, but there are some exceptions. There is a way to make them available everywhere, but that'll have to wait.

Styles

1. I just love these. If you're familiar with Layer Styles, you'll really appreciate this. Basically, styles are just pre-made actions that you apply to graphics, text and other things. You can access them in the Color palette on the right. The list is fairly small, so you'll want to load some more. Click the little arrow at the top of the box and at the bottom pick a category you want to load. When asked, click Append to add the new styles to your current list. In this picture I've loaded the "Glass Button" category.













2. With your text layer selected, just click on a style to apply it. Don't be surprised if it looks kind of ugly--you need to scale it down. In the Layers dropdown menu find Layer Style and at the very bottom click Scale. Bring the slider down to around 20% or less, depending on the size of your text, and click ok. Here's what you get.

4. You can create your own styles by combining various layer effects and then clicking New Style in the layer effects dialogue box. They can also be applied to shapes and various other things--I used them on my business card.

Well, that's certainly enough for one post. This really just scratches the surface of Photoshop's text editing abilities, but if you really like your text to look just right, these features should do the trick. Sorry about the length. If you made it all the way through, you deserve a medal!