Adobe Photoshop CS6 Manipulating Text

Hi everyone, Mike Brown here, welcome back to educator.com's Adobe Photoshop CS6 course.0000

In the last lesson I showed you the basics of using type, setting up linear type, paragraphs, how to pick your font size and adjust your type and so on and so forth in a pretty traditional fashion, so let's play in this lesson.0006

I'm going to show you a couple of cool ways to manipulate type, we're going to talk about how to warp type, create clipping pas, and I'm going to play with some type effects, just to show you some things we can do that are fun with type, so let's get started.0021

Here is a photograph I took of a place called Bad Water in Death Valley--by the way this is the lowest point on the continental United States, it's 280 feet below sea level.0038

I've created a type layer just in advance, this is simply Myriad Pro, and bold italic, we're going to...let's do bold italic, come on, bold italic...thank you.0051

And we're going to enhance that slightly, so now we have our type, the first thing I want to show you is how we can manipulate type.0073

We went across the Options bar last time, we talked about everything in the Character panel which is duplicated of course across here, with the exception of warping type, and here is a way to warp text.0084

Now, in this case with all of these options, you are actually warping the vector type.0097

I'm going to show you another way to manipulate type, but we have to decide exactly which font size and everything we want because we're going to have to shift it from vector to a regular raster pixeled image, but right now, let's take a look at the styles available to us, to warp type in Photoshop under the type layer.0106

So here we have several styles, you can arch (move that down a little bit...move the whole layer down) and you have your three sliders for bend, horizontal or vertical distortion--in this case, we can bring the arch down, we can horizontally distort it--notice how one end goes down and the other end comes up.0131

We can also distort vertically by pushing it kind of in a 3D fashion like it's going away from us, and bring that bend down a little bit, play with that.0155

You have arches where this is an actual arch...run this back to zero so you can see the difference...and we have all sorts of options--there's a flag wave...let's see what this fish eye does--oh yes, it's just like a fish eye lens, see that?0166

Yes...and squeeze squishes it together, all of these options are available to play with, we'll just cancel out of there for the moment.0188

So you have those which means you can apply any one of those to the text layer, and it will remain vector and then you can do everything else you want with it.0198

In this case, we're going to do something different--another way to warp type.0206

I'm going to duplicate the layer; Command or Control+J, of course the dropdown menu, duplicate layer or Layer, duplicate layer here, turn off the type layer, go to the Layer menu, go down to rasterize type.0211

Now, the layer is a fixed rastered image--it's no longer--you can see the transparency in the layer, it's no longer a type layer, as opposed to this one down here which is a type layer, this is rasterized.0228

So what we're going to do with here, is we'll select it, Command or Control click the thumbnail, then we'll go to the Edit menu, we could go to Free Transform--the easiest way is (they're all under here) but let's go the normal way--Command or Control+T...Command on a Mac...0244

Right click on a PC, Control click on a Mac, you get the dropdown menu--we're going to go to warp.0266

Now you see we have the--oops, get it back...we have the warp box; what we're going to do is we're going to play with the type, and we're going to take and stretch this one down a little bit...and we're going to stretch it up here and stretch it out here.0273

Now we're just going to play with this, see what we come up with...stretch a little bit that way, pull it down and round, let's see what happens when we do this, oh that's kind of cool.0296

Yes, I can deal with that, we'll commit that, and turn off the selection and now we have distorted our type.0316

So what we're going to do now, is I think I want to skew it once more, Control on a Mac, right click on a PC, I just want to give this a little angularity...there we go.0325

Alright, now we got some type...let's see how that fits, that's pretty decent, you get the idea, so now we've distorted a rastered layer of type, so let's see what we can do with this now.0340

I've got another image here, and this is a Death Valley image, I've selected an area, I'm going to copy it, go back to this image, and (let's get it on that) and we're just going to paste it--Command or Control+V...oops, there it is, why did--there it is.0354

Move it, now it's a little smaller than the other layer, so Command or Control+T for transform, and I'm just going to (doesn't really matter if we distort it a little bit) I'm going to stretch it out some...move it down a little like that so we have plenty of room for it, move it up to cover the image.0374

Now, you're going "what are you doing?"0393

I'm going to click OK.0394

Now, check this out, what we're going to do is we're going to select the type; Command on a Mac, Control on a PC, click the thumbnail, there's our selection.0396

We're going to go in between the layer with this yellow picture and the type layer, hold down our Option on a Mac, Alt on a PC and watch your cursor, when it gets between you get this dropdown arrow with a square.0407

What that means, it's going to clip or attach this rectangular layer to that layer below, and you'll see what happens, watch.0423

Option or Alt click...and look...what that did, is it attached it directly to the type layer, and we can actually move this, watch.0432

See if we can shift it around, I kind of like how that line goes through the middle, and so let's load this selection and let's do a little bit of curves adjustment, darken it down a little bit, snap the contrast...that looks kind of nice.0448

And let's do a little hue saturation to pop it just a little bit more, we're kind of going--ah, there you go.0466

OK, so now we've attached something to the type but it still doesn't have any pop to it, so now we're going to do layer effects to the type.0473

Highlight our type, rastered layer, we're going to go...in this case they're actually layer effects because we rasterized it but they'll do the same thing on type all by itself--we'll talk about that in the next lesson.0487

Let's go Bevel and then Boss, zoom this thing up a couple of times, and here we go, let's play.0502

We're going to do, let's see, outer Bevel, inner Bevel, let's inner Bevel, let's up the depth, it's coming you can see, let's change the size, let's make it like that just a little bit...and soften it just a hair, that looks OK.0509

That's making it look a little better don't you think?0529

So now, what else can we add?0532

Let's click on a--double click the effects and we'll open the panel back up again, let's do a little texturing, wow!0536

What was the pattern that I put in there?0546

Oh my, look at that, I just added the texture, and I want the depth...about in the middle...oh, we just want a little bit to add with it, it's linking it with a layer.0550

If we scale it up a little bit, there we go, now I'm going to turn that off and on...and we've gone from flat to that and you notice we've now, the picture still shows through but look what we've done.0569

We've added this texture to it--is that cool or what?0584

So that's kind of nice, I think we can up that just a little bit, let's make that a little bit...more...obvious, there, that's better, so now that we see there's this kind of stone look to it, that's really kind of cool, so now let's take another effect.0588

Let's go ahead for a drop shadow...and we're going to adjust the lighting, try to see, you can see the shadow over here, the light is coming from over the mountains as we're looking at the image back over your left shoulder probably at about...10 o'clock.0609

Now, you can adjust the light by changing the angle right here, watch this, we'll just go back to 135 to 140, and now you can see it's coming in from that same side.0630

We'll take the blend mode at normal, and...I think I would like to drop the opacity back some...we're doing the shadow, so we got the shadow out, softened it, that looks nice, let's get it out a little bit further, spread it just a little more, drop the opacity back and we've got a decent looking drop shadow.0641

And we can turn that off or on with the eye, we've taken that, gone to there, that looks pretty good, let's try one more, let's see if we can come up with a pattern overlay and throw that on there--yowee zowee...0671

Just a little on top--what have we got under here?0687

Here's all we've got showing for our patterns, but we can add more...let's go with some nature patterns, we'll append it...those came in, that's kind of cool, let's add one more section, how about erodible textures--I have no idea what that is...0690

And let's see what we've got now...as we switch through...the various textures here...just keep that opacity up so we can see it, pebbles...0713

There we go, I like that one a lot, let's drop it back just a little bit, there we go.0730

Now we have a nice, rough Death Valley, look, I don't think that the drop shadow should be a softer shadow--there we go...and there we've created--that color is just not what I want, so let's go with the hue saturation and change the hue and the lightness...and the saturation--let's just make it go crazy.0734

Let's do one more thing, we're going to play, and I'm going to...let's see, let's stroke the outside...and make it six, there we go, we've got a stroke going on it, and let's see what we've done.0761

So now we've taken our type, and we have distorted it by turning it into a regular layer, and we've stroked it, put a Bevel in and Boss, a pattern overlay and a drop shadow in it, played around with it, clipped another image to it, so that we got it to make the type only show up.0780

And we've made an interesting little piece of type, just starting with regular text.0806

Alright, let's see what we've got here, we went through warping, clipping and type effects, so there was just some semi-interesting things that you can do to play with your type by warping it, clipping another image to the type, and adding a whole bunch of type effects.0813

All in Photoshop CS6.0834