12 Photoshop Text Manipulation tips _photoshop

This is an article written by John Nack about the techniques of Photoshop text manipulation. Personal feeling very practical, so compile it, recommend to everyone for reference.

Update: PHOTOSHOP President Russell Brown has now produced video tutorials to showcase these skills-add four more tips, better than this one.

1. Photoshop CS2 adds a WYSIWYG font menu, so you can preview the font before you apply it. But what if you want to loop through the text in the document from beginning to end? Select the name of the current font in the options bar, and then click the top and Bottom button. This loops through all the fonts available in your system from beginning to end.

Figure 1

2, if you find yourself repeatedly setting the same text style (such as Times New Roman, 12pt, underline, no anti-aliasing), then you can create a font tool preset. Click on the Preset tool icon (you know, no one will click on this button in the top left corner), click on the new Preset button, and then you will record all of the current font parameters (which, by the way, works almost all of the tools).

Figure 2

3, in CS2, it is now easier to change the settings of multiple text layers immediately. Select the layer you want to select (Hold down shift in the Layers panel and click to select a range, or hold down cmd/Ctrl (Win) and click to select nonadjacent layers). Any changes you make to the font settings will apply to all of the selected layers. If you're using a CS1 or earlier version, it works as well, but the method is somewhat covert: link all the layers you want to change, and then hold down the SHIFT key before changing the font properties.

4. If you want less trouble, press cmd+ to enter (MAC) or CTRL + ENTER (Win) when you complete one line of text settings. This way, Photoshop submits and completes the text edits instead of adding a newline (carriage return).
5. If you set up a text paragraph in Photoshop (such as a typesetting web page), and if the process consists of "type typing in" type Enter, type Enter to enter the form-for your mind to clear, please stop this operation! You just click on the Font tool, and then drag to create a text box (like the one shown below). This way, if you need to change the size of the text box, you do not need to remove and reset a large number of hard returns.

Figure 5

6, OK, cool, but what if you want to fill in more than just boxes and want to be 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 inside of the path. The cursor will change and you can type text in the path, as shown in Figure 6-2 below. Especially good is that 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, again, you can set the text along the path. Drag out the path, and then use the Font tool to click Next to the outside of the path. The text on the path in Et voilá--photoshop.

Figure 7

8. Starting with Photoshop 6, clicking the Transform button in the options bar (Figure 8-1) makes text morphing possible. When the font is in an editable state, clicking on it appears with the option of a series of distorted fonts (Figure 8-2). But do you know ...

Figure 8-1

Figure 8-2

8.1, you can make text deformation movement. After creating a variant, build another frame, change the deformed text, and click the Motion Tween button on the animation panel. boom--you get an effect like this (but the method works well).

Figure 8.1-1

8.2, to get more text deformation control, first convert the text into a smart object (select Layer-> Smart Object-> Group to new Smart object). This provides two main benefits: you can apply a custom shape (push it freely, as in the following image), and you can warp multiple text layers like a single layer (you can no longer animate the distorted text to which the smart object is applied).

Figure 8.2-1

9. Illustrator CS2 has added a series of powerful typography tools-richer than Photoshop offers. But since illustrator now shares the font engine with Photoshop, you can use such glyphs features in illustrator and open the font panel to set the text, and then copy the text, paste it in Photoshop, and keep it fully editable (but make sure you select the letter in Illustrator, not the entire text object, and click the Font tool before pasting in Photoshop) before copying. Alternatively, if you have a large amount of text in the illustrator, you can try exporting it as a PSD file (exported through the menu "file->"). The text can be saved--including the path text and the shape text--that's pretty amazing.

Figure 9-1

Figure 9-2

10, do not blindly believe any program of the letter spacing typesetting. Take the time to make sure the text looks decent, adjust the kerning when the word spacing is too tight or too loose (click between letters, then hold down the OPT (MAC)/alt (Win), and then press the left/right front key to adjust the word spacing). You might also want to check out Geoff Stearns about setting appropriate Web resolution fonts (the printing resolution default setting of 72DPI may not render the best results, and vice versa).

11, when you process a line of text press cmd (MAC)/ctrl (Win) key. This will let you reset the text position in the layer without having to submit your edits first.

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