12 Photoshop text operations

This is an article written by John Nack about Photoshop text operation skills. I personally think it is very practical, so it is recommended to compile it for your reference.

Updated: Photoshop President Russell Brown has now created video tutorials to demonstrate these skills-four additional tips, better than this article.

1. Photoshop CS2 adds a WYSIWYG font menu, so you can preview the font before applying it. But what if you want to view the font cyclically from start to end in the document? In the option bar, select the name of the current font and click the upper and lower keys. This will show all available fonts in your system cyclically from start to end.

Figure 1

2. If you find that you have repeatedly set the same text style (such as Times New Roman, 12pt, underline, and no anti-aliasing), you can create a font tool preset. Click the icon of the preset tool (you know, no one will click the button in the upper left corner), click the new preset button, and then you will record all the current font parameters (by the way, this method is effective for almost all tools ).

Figure 2

3. In CS2, it is easier to change the settings of multiple text layers immediately. Select the layer you want to select (in the layer panel, press Shift and then click to select a range, or press Cmd (Mac)/Ctrl (Win) and then click to select a non-adjacent Layer ). Any changes you make to the font settings will be applied to all selected layers. If you are using CS1 or a later version, it works as well, but the method is somewhat concealed: link all layers to be changed, and hold down the Shift key before changing the font attribute.

4. If you have less trouble, press Cmd + press enter (Mac) or Ctrl + press enter (Win) when setting a line of text ). In this way, Photoshop submits and completes text editing, instead of adding a new line break (Press ENTER ).
5. If you set text paragraphs (such as typographical Web pages) in Photoshop, and if this process is completed by "type, type, and press ENTER, type, type, and press enter to make up your mind clear. Please stop this operation! You just need to click the font tool and drag it to create a text box (like this ). In this way, if you need to modify the text box size, you do not need to delete and reset a large number of hard keys.

Figure 5

6. Good and cool. But if you want to fill in not only boxes, but also irregular shapes? Use the pen tool to draw the shape (make sure it is set to the drawing path, see Figure 6-1), and then use the font tool to hover around the path. The cursor will change and you can type text in the path, as shown in Figure 6-2 below. Particularly, the path and text can still be edited, which means that if you adjust the path, the text will automatically change again.

Figure 6-1

Figure 6-2

7. Similarly, you can set text along the path. Drag the path, use the font tool, and click outside the path. Et voil á-the path text in Photoshop.

Figure 7

8. From Photoshop 6, click the deformation button in the option bar (Figure 8-1) to make text deformation possible. When the font is editable, click it to display a series of options for deformation fonts (Figure 8-2 ). But do you know ......

Figure 8-1

Figure 8-2

8.1. You can make text deformation and motion. After creating a deformation, create another frame, change the deformation text, and click the animation pad button on the animation panel. Boom -- you get an effect like this (but the method is not good ).

Figure 8.1-1

8.2 To get more text deformation control, first convert the text to a smart object (choose layer> Smart Object> group to new smart object ). This provides two main benefits: you can apply a custom shape (freely push and pull it, like this ), and you can deform multiple text layers as a single layer (you cannot create an animation for the deformation text of a smart object ).

Figure 8.2-1

9. Illustrator CS2 has added a series of powerful typographical tools-richer than Photoshop. But since Illustrator now shares the font engine with Photoshop, you can use features such as Glyphs in Illustrator, open the font panel, set text, copy text, and paste it in Photoshop, make sure that you select letters in Illustrator instead of the entire text object before copying. Click the font tool before pasting in Photoshop ). Alternatively, if you have a lot of text in Illustrator, you can try to export it as a PSD file (via the menu "file-> export "). These texts can be saved-including path text and shape text-which is quite surprising.

Figure 9-1

Figure 9-2

10. Do not blindly trust the letter spacing layout of any program. Take some time to make sure the text looks decent. Adjust the padding when the padding is too tight or too loose (click between letters, and then hold down Opt (Mac)/Alt (Win) do not place or press the left/right front key to adjust the font spacing ). You may also want to check the Geoff Stearns tips on setting appropriate Web resolution fonts (the default printing resolution setting is 72dpi, and may not display the best results, or vice versa ).

11. when processing a line of text, press the Cmd (Mac)/Ctrl (Win) Key. This will allow you to reset the text position in the layer without submitting your edits first.

12. To select the entire text string (all text in a layer), double-click the thumbnail of the layer in the layer panel.