How To Use The Photoshop Type Tool

Learn to use the type tool in photoshop. Add text with the fonts and font color you choose. Use the character panel to change character spacing and spread out your lines of text. Use the type tool to add a paragraph of text.

New to Photoshop? Want to learn how to use the photoshop type tool? In today’s video, I’m going to show you all you need to know, in order to get started with the type tool in Photoshop.

How To Add or Place Text In Photoshop Type Tool

So first, we’re going to add or place text, on this photo. If you type T, that’s the short cut for the type tool. And you come over here, and right-click on the type tool icon. You can see you have the horizontal and vertical type tool. We’re going to use the horizontal type tool. And there’s a couple ways that you can actually add type to a photo. And if you want to add a paragraph, all you need to do is drag a box. And you can see that Photoshop added some default text. And I’ve already got some text copied, and I’m goin’ to copy it right there, and paste it, into that box. And to accept this text into the box, you can say Command + Enter, or you could come up here to this checkbox. Notice here that Photoshop has created a text layer, in the Layers panel over here. Another way that you can add text, with the text tool selected, is just click, in your document, or your photo. We’re gonna type in “Cruise Ship Terminal.” And come up here and click on this check mark. And see now we have two layers here, in our layer panel. We’re gonna come back to the paragraph. I’m going to add another text layer here. Just click, and I’m gonna say, “Long Beach Pier Five.” Click on the checkbox.

How To Select Text In Photoshop Type Tool

So now, in order to select text, come up here to the move tool. So the auto-select, that should be checked, because, if you wanna hit it, a certain line of text, you just click on it. And it automatically selects the layer, in the Layers panel. So in this case, I selected Cruise Ship Terminal, and with the move tool, if I double-click there, I’ve selected the entire text. If I wanna select anywhere inside of that layer, I click on the text tool. And I can just put my cursor anywhere in there, and move it around, I can also go from the first character and just hold my mouse down and I can select it all that way too, so that’s how you would select text, within that text layer. So for right now I’m gonna turn off this paragraph.

How To Edit Text In Photoshop Type Tool

So now we’re gonna go over how to actually edit the text. If I wanna edit text, I can hit V for the move tool. Click on my text that I wanna edit, and right up here on the Options bar there, you can toggle your text orientation. You can see that that made a vertical text. And if I’m on the text tool, and I toggle that back. It’s put it back to a horizontal text. So that’s your text orientation. So now if we wanna change the font, like for instance, if I click on V for the move tool, double-click on my text. And you have all these fonts here, that you can actually, first of all, filter by, you can filter by all the Adobe fonts. Those are all your Creative Cloud fonts. If you’ve favored, like I have a star next to this text here, you can favor ’em. And you can just filter by similar fonts too. And if you come over here to More from Adobe Fonts, click on that. A browser window comes up. And you can use your Creative Cloud Adobe Fonts to find more fonts that you want, and activate them. So I’m gonna double-click on this Long Beach Pier Five, and come up here to the fonts. And you can see as I move over the fonts, it changes here. You can kinda get a preview of how it looks, all these different fonts. Just for now I’m gonna choose Helvetica New as a font, and I’m going to come over here to the other line of text, choose Helvetica New. And now I’ve changed the font, on both these lines of text. And continuing with the options here, you can choose different weights of the font. I’m gonna change this to Thin. And here you can increase your font and decrease it. And just by dragging, you can see that the font has gotten bigger. Sharp has to do with the smoothness of the edges, of the font. You have the different settings here for that. And you just usually keep it on Sharp. Here you have your alignment tools. Whether you want your left-aligned center or right-aligned. In here you can change your font color, just click there, choose a color you like. And say OK. And for demonstration purposes I’m going to move this up here. Come back to T from my font menu. I’m gonna bring this down a little bit further. V for the move tool, move it. And T for the Text tool, because I’m going to show you now what this is. This has to do with, you can warp the text. This menu of all the options. Arc. We’ll do something like this. And if I move this somewhere over here, over the terminal there. So that’s what Create Warped Text does. And you have all these other options that you can do. This option here, is that you can toggle the character and paragraph panels. If I click on that, here is your character and paragraph panels, we’ll go over this in a minute.

How To Resize Text In Photoshop Type Tool

But I wanna work a little bit more on the resizing, I can double-click on this text down here. I come up here to the font size, I can select a higher font here. I can also drag along the right and left, right along the font text right here. And hit the check mark to commit. But double-click on the move tool. And click Show Transform Controls. I can hold Shift, and grab this end right here. And resize it like this too. And click the check mark, to commit that, and uncheck Show Transform Controls, so you don’t see that no more. So that’s a few ways to actually resize the text. I can resize just one character, if I click T for the text tool. And come over here and just select, say, the number five. I can come up here to where the options are and slide this to the left, and slide this to the right. And increase my one character at a time.

How To Move Text In Photoshop Type Tool

And if I wanna move this text around. All I have to do is, V for the move tool. And if I make sure Auto-Select is checked and the option right here says Layer. And if I wanna just move this cruise ship terminal. I just click on that. And move that around just like that. I can come over here and click on this layer, and because I have the Auto-Select checked, it highlights the right text layer in the Layers panel. So I can move this around. And if I wanna change color on one of these particular layers of text. Say I wanna change Long Beach Pier Five. Double-click on that, and come up here, and click. Here’s my color picker. And say I wanna make that red, click OK, click the check mark. And that’s how you change color of the text. And you can also change color of one character, T for the text tool. Just select that particular character. You can come up here and change it to whatever color you want. Say OK, click on the check box. And we’ve changed the color of just one character.

Now we’ve been resizing text, so in order to rotate this text, maybe hit V for the move tool. Come up here to where it says Show Transform Controls. When you hold your cursor right on the edge, it’s a two-sided arrow. And you can just hold down. And it rotates your text just like that. And of course click, Show Transform Controls again, so that you don’t see those handles on there. Up until now, when we hit the T for the type tool. You can see in the Options menu bar up here. We had several options that we can change the font, change font size. So now there’s another option that we can use. And it’s called the character window. So up here at the top. There’s this icon on the Options menu bar. You click that, and up pops a window called Character and Paragraph. And that same option could be over here on this right menu bar. If you come up here to Window. So you don’t see that over there, you come up here to character and character styles, and put a check mark by both of those. And then it’s gonna show up over here, so there’s the character, and there’s the paragraph menus.

So the character window has several options to format characters. There’s just a lot more options here. I’m gonna change this text down here, this Long Beach Pier Five. I’m gonna hit T for the text tool. You can put the Pier Five on a line below, V to use the move tool, I’m just gonna move it up just like this. And if I select all that text, by double-clicking on it with the move tool. Select it. I can use these alignment tools. So if I wanna center that text, it would look like that. Left justify. Right justify. So if I say Center. Click on the check box. So that’s how I’d use the alignment tools. So again, B for the move tool. Double-click on the text. And those options are available. So the character window, if I click on that. You can see, I have the same options up here, I can change my font. And I think I’m gonna change this text here to bold. So I have that option. And here I can also change my font. Just like I could above on the Options panel. And I can also change my font color here. Just like on the Options panel. So let’s go through some of these options. So right here you’re able to customize the kern, that’s the space between specific characters. You can either select the metrics or the optical. So a lotta times that isn’t used that much, so I’m going to put that on zero. What we’re really interested in is the tracking.

So the tracking is gonna set the space in between the characters. So right now I have the Long Beach Pier Five selected, and if I adjust the tracking, you can see that the space between the characters changes. So that’s helpful. Not so much this kerning here, I just left that at zero. Next we have the horizontal and vertical scaling. So here we have the vertical scaling. And you can see that the letters are getting taller. Shorter, horizontal scaling. It’s spreading out everything. Scales horizontally, the whole text. Next we have something called, the baseline shift. You need to see how this is shifting this text. It’s very useful when you want to make your text layer fit somewhere, such as around an image. So you use this baseline. And up here you have something called leading.

So that adjusts the space between words. So when I put that Pier Five below long beach. Here I’m spacing that text, a little bit further down. So that’s leading. So next we have Faux Bold. This is Photoshop’s version of bolding. This Helvetica New had a bold weight already. Built into the font, but, this is like Photoshop’s bold that you can apply right here. And you can see, it made it, a little bolder, little bit different than the actual bold that Helvetica New came with. And there’s the italic, same thing. It’s a Faux Italic. And here, if this was all lower case, it could’ve made it all upper case. Small caps. And these are different scripts. And this is subscript, and this is superscript. You have a underline, and you have a strikethrough. So you have all these options here. So those are all the character options.

Now we can come over to Paragraph. And I have this paragraph here. In it, we have all the different alignment tools. Just like any word processing program, you can go through all of these, and choose which one to align for your paragraph. Also, you have an option here. Same as the point text, that we were using before, you can rotate this text. You can grab these, and resize. You can see its size is two. Whatever text you have in there. You can use the character, like the leading. And I can put space in between my lines, just like that.

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