Adobe Photoshop CS6 Using Text In Photoshop

Hi everybody, Mike Brown here again with you, welcome back to educator.com's Adobe Photoshop CS6 course.0000

We've been talking about everything you need to do to enhance, improve, modify, distort, play with your photographs, now we're going to talk about another feature of Photoshop that goes beyond photography, and that is using text in Photoshop.0007

I think I've got a--actually adjust the layer here...there we go...in fact what you can just see on your screen that I did, this is a document--a layered document using text, and I just had to move it to balance my composition out, so that's another feature of Photoshop.0025

Photoshop is equally as powerful for the world of graphics as it is for the world of pure photography, and the combination there of making layouts for various and sundry ads, promotions, posters, all sorts of stuff.0043

For example...here is a page of a book--I wrote a textbook on Photoshop CS3, 4, 5 and I'm now modifying it for CS6 and here is a page that I created from scratch, a page of my textbook--the whole textbook was created in Photoshop and as you can see, there's multiple layers on a page.0061

We have text, obviously we also have shapes, we have document picture layers, we have vector layers, all sorts of stuff but predominantly here there's a lot of text, so this was all utilized, not just photography here, this is a graphic design page, all done in Photoshop.0085

So text is a very powerful tool, and another one of the Adobe Creative Suite programs called InDesign which is the layout creation program for graphic designers and art directors, where you bring various objects, graphics, photographs, and you create layouts in there with type.0110

The type feature in InDesign is identical to the type feature in Photoshop, so what you're going to learn in this lesson about text applies precisely to the text features in InDesign.0132

So in this lesson, we're going to talk about fonts, which are the actual pieces of text themselves, the different looks to the fonts, the styles of fonts, so on and so forth, creating linear text, creating paragraph text, and also a little bit about graphic design--I'll show you how you work with guides and grids.0147

Alright, let's get started.0170

Alright, let me close out my Layers panel, and let's just fit this right into the screen.0172

Here we have the two panels that are associated with the Text tool--now the Type tool is down in your Toolbox right below the Pen tool under the big T, and the shortcut is the letter T.0178

There are four sub-tools; the Horizontal Type tool which makes just what it says, horizontal type, Vertical Type makes vertical type.0192

The Horizontal Type Mask and Vertical Type Mask tool--I've never used them, they're there, but we're just going to talk about predominantly Horizontal Type--I'm going to just show you what Vertical Type looks like, and you see that the icon was sideways, and we'll call this as Vertical Type...0201

And it's a layer, just like everything, and you see it just came in vertically, OK, we'll delete that.0222

Now let's go back and set this at our traditional horizontal type.0226

These are your two panels; the Character panel and the Paragraph panel.0230

Under the Window menu, Character or Paragraphs.0235

Now, I've already pre-put these in my dock; there is the Character panel, there is the Paragraph panel, they're duplicated right up here so that I can give you indicators as to what's what.0240

I would suggest that you pause this video momentarily and take a screenshot of this document so that you can keep this for reference, or just come back and watch the video again.0252

Alright, I'm going to open up the Character panel, I'm going to detach it and put it right here inside this document, get a different screen view, now we can get started.0265

OK...so we're talking first about linear type.0277

The way you make a line or multiple lines of type in Photoshop is open a document, and very simply (let me open up the Layers panel so you can see this) I actually had already had this in here, and I'm going to recreate it.0282

We have a--doesn't matter what layer is highlighted, a new layer comes in right above it so when I click with the icon (the little corner) you see a flashing cursor that indicates that it's live, you also see a new layer with T for text, and these are samples of lines of--and I'm going to make a mistake in...0301

Created in Photoshop.0330

Now when you get to the end of typing, and you want to commit your type--that is set it down and normally when you make an adjustment you just hit Enter or Return, in this case, if you know what a typewriter was in the old days, when you get to the end of a line and you hit the return, the carriage would move back to the next line.0335

So if I hit Return, notice my cursor is now over here and I could continue typing...to set type in place when you're done--that's something you have to remember because you're so used to hitting the Return--I do it all the time, and you go "oh my gosh, I blew it".0359

You go up here to either cancel it or commit it, that's the arrow, and that would be committed.0378

Now, let's say we wanted to make this into two lines of type--oh, by the way, here's the Move tool, it is a layer, and we'll move it over, and there is the entirety--and I made a mistake, but I'd like to make this into two lines and it looks like I'd like to separate it right after the word 'of', so I'll reactivate my Type tool.0384

And I'll just click by the T, delete to get it back here--now if I hit Return, notice, I have a second line of type, and I will hit the commit by the checkmark this time, Move tool, and move it back over.0409

Now, this is great, I screwed up and I made typos.0426

Now, you can always go to Edit, Check Spelling, and it's going to say...in created, and I would do that, change that...and it doesn't like it because it isn't correct.0430

OK, that's why it was doing that.0451

Alright, so what I'm going to do to correct this is highlight the Type tool, insert my cursor and delete, and it was samples of lines of type, proper spelling, created should have a small C, sample should have a small S (a lower case S).0454

Now to commit, either checkmark or Command on a Mac, Control on a PC and Return, and it's committed, OK?0474

That's how you create a basic line or multiple lines of type.0485

Now, let's talk about what you're creating.0490

This is the Character panel, and it's right over here active (I'm going to take that away) and what we have now is you can see the name of the font, the style of the font on the right side here, we have several options--here is light for this font.0494

There's a light, there's regular, oblique is italicized, or bold, or bold oblique--these are the five choices for this particular font.0511

Let's go back to the font themselves.0526

We have, on the dropdown menu, an enormous number of fonts--I've added a lot to my basics on here but you start out with quite a number of fonts that come with your computer, and a traditional one is Myriad Pro...0529

We'll just throw Myriad Pro on it, and you notice it changed its look, different font altogether, and under Myriad Pro you notice we have quite a choice of the font styles.0543

Now, if you're not sure what font you want, it's very simple; highlight it and just use your arrow keys to go up alphabetically or down alphabetically and you will see the various fonts (that's weird, never seen that before) and we just go until we find something that we like...0557

Let's find something nice and clean...there we go, something that looks pretty traditional like a news print, and this is Minion Pro, and here are the various (let's go with semi bold) I like that.0581

OK, so we've now chosen Minion Pro, and the style for that font is semi bold, that's very easy to see how we do that, OK.0596

Now, the size for the font is right below the name of the font; in this case...it's 16 point--if we want to go--these are presets, let's go up to 18 point.0606

OK, you can also scrubby to go up or down, I don't find that very precise with type, and you really need to be precise--you're just changing things in minute increments, and it's very hard to do this so we'll just go and select and type it in here--you could click Enter.0620

We've got 17 points--that's the size of the letters, next to that we have what's called Leading, and the reason it's called 'Leading', not 'Leeding', is in the early days of printing way back in the dark ages, they used lead letters, metal letters that they would set in a box and then they would spin that thing and thin down and press the letters with ink on the letters against paper...0637

And the way they spread the spacing between the lines of type, like this in between these two, was to put strips of lead to separate the letters, and so this became called Leading, and we change that (it's on auto right now) there's a dropdown menu to give you presets--that's a little too close, 14, 18 is OK.0663

I'd like to drop down just a hair so I'll highlight it and go 17, click Enter, and it's now the way I want it--you have to be careful when you're doing the Leading because watch your lower case letters with the high finishes versus the capitals.0687

And look here, for example the H (let's zoom up so you can see it) the H in Photoshop is actually higher than the Caps so you want to be careful so your letters look balanced in the spread of the lines.0705

OK, that's Leading.0719

Tracking is, instead of space between line, it's space between letters, so if we increase that which was at zero, we can actually squeeze them further by going minus, notice?0721

Or, we can spread them apart by going plus, in this case I go about a minus 5...and again, if you wanted more you could go like minus 8, and there we have that, so that's what the Tracking is.0735

Leading is between the lines, Tracking is space between letters.0750

Kerning, is a term that--and you can see that they're using the V and the A here, let me create another line of type here in capitals; V, A, M, W, and I'm going to commit it, and I'm also going to change it to a standard font...Helvetica, that works pretty good.0755

Let's zoom it up...and let me add a couple of letters; O, P, Y, then an H, and commit it.0779

Now you notice, these are the odd letters, and we can see right now that the Kerning is set at what's called Metrics--it's an algorithm that uses metric mathematics to determine spacing.0792

There's also Optical, which uses a different algorithm, and the third one is none at all, so let's take the Kerning and turn it off, and you notice the letters spread apart somewhat, and I want you to look, the space between the N and the H, the O and the P, and look over here at the V and the A.0805

You will see that it looks odd (I'll zoom it out one) it just doesn't look balanced...and in this case, let's take the M out of there and leave it with the W and the A, and you can see the same thing there--they're kind of overlapping each other.0827

Let's throw a J in here...and that'll even do it better.0845

Now you have these odd looking spaces, that's because there's no Kerning--the objective here is to take the odd shaped letters, and make them come closer or further apart so that visually your line of text looks proper--it doesn't affect a lot of letters, just the odd ones, now watch what happens.0852

I'm going to go for Metric, watch the V and the A specifically here...notice, it moved them back together and if you look across the span, the y and the J look a little bit spread, the V and the A looks better and the N and the H still good--let's go for Optical...and that even pushed them closer together and you notice now it looks like they're absolutely even.0872

And let's change the letter spacing to zero, and everything looks optically correct here, let's go back to zero and you'll see what I'm saying.0897

That's what Kerning does, let's just go ahead and delete that entire layer.0907

The purpose of Kerning is to take the odd letter and correct them--let's see if it does anything with this line of type right here (let's make sure we're on that) and we'll set the Kerning at Optical, and we'll go to zero.0912

Didn't make a lot of difference, look at the Ts and the Hs though, let's try Metric, and let's try Optical...didn't do much there, with this particular font it didn't change it a lot, but that's what Kerning's all about.0929

Now you have height and width letter distortion--let's go to a traditional, clean font; Helvetica again, and I just want Helvetica plain.0945

OK, this is 100% and 100%, let's spread them apart just a little more so we can see it (let's go like 25, there we go) so now we're going to take and change the 100% height to 130, click Enter.0958

Notice it stretched the letters upwards, and we can do the same thing with the width of the letters--let's go 130% there.0975

It didn't change the space between them, it just actually spread the letters apart, so you have options for controlling the look of your type.0984

In addition to doing it that way, you can also adjust your color (let's make this some deep blue) now we have blue type.0992

This one I don't use and I'm not sure precisely what it's doing, ah, I know what it is, it's changing the actual baseline of your type, so in other words your baseline's here, it's going to move the whole thing up or down--it's just positioning the paragraph.1001

In other words, if you get it wrong you can do it that way, but personally, easiest way is just to use your--oops...is to use the Move tool, and I got the wrong...layer.1019

Here we go, use the Move tool and you can move it, so you have options there.1037

Color there, OK, then this final line underneath here...you notice, what it's doing is changing the size of the type artificially--this is not by changing the font, this is just mathematics within Photoshop.1041

You can artificially make it bold, artificially make it italic, add underline or strike through, these are the options.1059

Now, this grayed out line--some type fonts have the option to change things such as, I don't use it, but let's type in one half, and commit it, and let's go find a different font where this lights up--there it was.1067

Now, this one half is traditional, if this one makes it look the way you would like to see it in a mathematics formula, and it does a couple of other things that I haven't used too much, so that shows you pretty much what the Character panel does and how to set (let's go back to the linear type, there we go) and how to create lines of type in Photoshop.1086

So now let's deal with paragraphs of type, OK.1115

Let's go back...and open up--I'm going to put the Characters panel away, and open up the Paragraph panel, peel it off, and I also want to get a...let's change our arrangement to float all in windows, make this a little smaller, move this one which is a paragraph over, put this away, and we'll leave a picture there, OK.1119

Now, the Paragraph panel, pretty simple; we have a paragraph of type that I've created already up here, and let me set everything to zero...that should be at complete zero and why is it not?1147

Something has been set...oh, there it is, sorry...OK.1166

Come on, let's get the zeros in here, OK, there's a traditional paragraph of type with no changes whatsoever.1178

What you can see (let's zoom it up, bring it in so you can see it) and as you see, there it is within a textbox--let me show you how to make a textbox.1184

To create a paragraph, all you have to do, get your Type tool, click and drag and you have a paragraph box.1199

Now this textbox can be changed; grab a corner and you can change the size at any time, and depending upon your alignment, in this case you notice the three alignments are left, center--look where the cursor is flashing (let's make a larger...point...let's get this up to 22 points and click again, OK, there we go).1207

What did I do wrong?1232

Textbox, click, now your cursor is left, justified or aligned left, align center--there's your flashing cursor, so if you start typing, notice how it spreads the line until it gets to the next line--starts in the center.1234

In the case of right hand justification or alignment, there it is over there, so those are your three options of alignments.1250

You understand how you set up your textbox (let's close that out)...and there's a previous one that I've already set, and if you notice when I click within it with the Text tool, there's the textbox.1259

now I can change the shape of this by coming up and over here.1276

Notice, now we have...commit it, and there we've changed the paragraph, but once again with left alignment, when I typed it, every time I made a paragraph I just return and start, but you really don't see much adjustment, so the adjustments are simple.1281

You have left align, center align, right align, very simple.1297

You also have left justify which means the left and right edges are straight, and it moves them over until it hits that edge, and then goes back and the shorter lines end up shorter lines.1303

You also have the option to hyphenate letters--in this case it didn't do anything, let's make this a little bit narrower like that, and then we'll bring it down just a little...I think that's it right there...1318

Set it in place, and what happens if we hyphenate--now you can see that the box was such that without the hyphenating, it gave you the full letters, but if you want to hyphenate you can get it even a little more condensed, we'll leave it un'.1334

Center justified, once again, straight edges, adjust, it makes everything work from the center; right, same thing there, and this justifies everything and if that looks familiar, this is the way news print is done.1351

You notice you have finite columns, left and right, and every line goes from left to right--notice, what it does is it spreads the words to fit it.1367

Now, if we click hyphenate here, it still spreads the words but allows it to hyphenate--I prefer non-hyphenated if possible if it looks good, we'll just go left justified.1376

Now, the other controls here are very simple...this indents the entire left margin--we happen to be left justified, so we really just kind of moved it all that direction.1388

Indent left margin is really good because what you're doing is indenting the first line of type, and now you've separated the paragraphs so they show really well.1403

OK, and add space before...it added space before the next paragraph, so it actually separated your paragraphs for you, you can scrubby them back, and that looks nice, and then if we also indented the first line, look how nice that looks now.1416

Hyphenate obviously adds space after...it's now going below instead of before the paragraph, so we really don't need both of those, and this one here is indent the right margin which would move it that way, so there's how you make your adjustments on your paragraphs.1438

Alright, now...I'm just going to put that away, put the paragraph one back, now I'm going to show you how to put type into a photograph.1458

We have a paragraph of type here, there are our two...layers in here, and the type layer doesn't have to be highlighted, and it could be more layers in this thing as well, just grab the layer, drag it and drop it, and it will size itself according to the resolution of the image that you drop it in.1473

If you want to resize it (let's just move it over) let's say it's a little small, you don't have to change the physical type face sizing, you can go to the Edit menu and go to Transform, because you can transform the type just like you could before with an image or a particular layer.1496

Free Transform, hold your Shift key, and just drag it, and there you go, or you can actually drag it this way, and you're distorting the type slightly...let's bring it back down to there, and now we commit it, and you change the size of the paragraph block.1519

OK, and there you have--and you can adjust that and of course you can always change your colors now, anything that you want--actually let's change it to the color of these panels right here, and there you have it, and so now you have a paragraph of type inside of a photograph.1541

Alright, let's go back and consolidate all to tabs and go back and look at our text title, and we have now taken a good look at fonts (let's add a layer up on top, we've got it).1562

We've looked at fonts and how they work and how you adjust them, we've looked at how you set linear text, how you work with paragraph text, and now I want to talk a little bit about guides and grids.1577

We can do it right on this--actually, let's go with this page right here...when I set this up, it was actually (let me turn off that layer and let me crop this back to roughly this) this was the way I originally had it, and I deliberately made a mistake.1592

If you'll notice, that the alignment of the Character panel, the Paragraph Panel is slightly off.1617

I did that just for this particular exercise here today, and how do you align it?1625

Let's go get our layers out, and we're going to go--OK, there's the layer, I could use the Move tool and I could move it over visually like that, that's probably pretty close, and make sure the height's good on everything--that looks fairly close.1630

But to do it with true precision, especially if you're doing graphic design...you want to use guides and grids.1648

Now, if you remember in the Preferences, I had you set the gridline every .25 inches rather than one with four sub-divisions and we put colors on these.1659

Here's your grids; View, Rulers, Command+R, show grid, there are no guides yet so we'll just show the grid.1671

Notice the shortcut is Command on a Mac, Control on a PC plus the apostrophe, turns them on, and remember each one of these squares is a quarter inch with four separations, the default was one, two, three, four inches--it's just too course.1682

So if I want to align this layer, notice where this one is--you see I'm still a little bit off on that layer; got the layer, move and I'm just going to align it so it comes over right there and I'll check the right side of it, and just right about there and now I very easily align that accurately to match the other one.1701

I can check the positioning, for example, of this particular line of type by taking a quick look at the grid.1723

One, two, three big ones and three lines, one, two, three big ones and one line so that's slightly off too, so I'll highlight that one with my Move tool, and I'm going to go 1.5, one, two, three and 2.5--one, two, three...that's still not right.1733

Now I'll show you how we'll fix that one.1755

We're going to go the other route...remember the shortcut; Command on a Mac, Control on a PC and apostrophe, off and on, or View, Show, grid gone.1757

We're going to turn on the rulers--Command or Control+R.1769

Now a...what we want to do here is we want guides--I want to see we're dead center in this image--all you have to do to generate a guide is to go over into the rulers, notice it changes to an arrow.1773

Click and drag, and you see it's pulling a guide--now watch what happens--I'm pulling gently...notice it hesitates right there, it wants to stop.1786

That's dead center, if I do the same thing here, pulling downward...there.1797

It wanted to stop, that's dead center horizontal and vertical, so I can see right now that it appears I'm a little left, but that's hard to say with the drop shadow, that's alright.1806

In terms of this line of type, watch what happens...it should...there it is...make it stop right there, and so you have to do this very gently, and it grabbed it.1818

Let's go View, Show, grid, and now take a look--we're exactly three; one, two, three, it missed...so it's not working well on the grab there, but three plus two, three plus two, there we are, we've centered that.1834

See, it's three plus two, one, two, three squares plus two and it's dead center there.1852

Bottom here's a little low but we're OK, notice how I was able to align all the arrows and all of the other stuff.1857

Grids and guides, now to turn off the rulers--Command or Control+R...your guides are still there--to turn them off the shortcut is Command or Control, semi-colon.1864

And for the grid, Command or Control apostrophe, or View, Show...grids and guides or rulers, there's how you create--let's just turn them back on so you can see them all.1877

That's how you do that, so let's go back and wrap it up, and now we've talked about guides and grids.1892

A little bit about graphic design; fonts, linear text, paragraph text, guides and grids in Photoshop CS6.1900