Lessons

Lesson Info

Type Techniques

first, I want to talk a little bit about working with type, because type and photo shop is kind of, in my opinion, almost overlooked thing. People occasionally at a bit of text toe put their name on the bottom or something like that. And to me, type has always been important. My background. Before all this digital stuff started, I originally I was laying out a newsletter using traditional typesetting, where you get a big, long galley of type from the typesetter. You type it out on an IBM Selectric typewriter and mark it up and say, Make this this many points in this much spacing and everything else. And then you cut and paste in the old sense of the word onto the you know, the layout board you were using and then send that to the print and back. Then preparation for printing was you draw box and say, Insert photo here and then someone in the preproduction part would do all that work. But the same time type still played a major role, and a lot of it was based on people who knew typograp...

hy and knew how to set type, so it looked really good and in photo shop. Of course, adding Texas easy, but making it look really good takes a little bit of extra. That's what I want to talk about today, because most people can figure out use the type tool. It's pretty simple, but a few little tricks and a few little ways that you can really fine tune your type. I will warn everyone, however, that one of things that I discovered when I first started working with Type Digitally and programs like Illustrator Photo Shop is once you start looking at type this certain way, it's gonna drive you crazy. Now, when you're driving down the street, you see a sign outside of office building or something, and the current ing is off on the letters. There's a building. I drive by every day, and I'm just like, I want to get out of my car and take the letters and just get the spacing properly cause it looks horrible. So that's the downside that once you start getting into, like turning and tracking all those things, you start being more critical of every piece of tightly. See, So the good news about working with type is that is automatically an edible layer based function, so we don't have to worry about being nondestructive with tight, because by nature, it issue don't have to add a new layer. First, you just start adding type. There's a couple of things that you can right away do that can change the way type is applied because there's actually a couple of different type tools. There's actually a series of them, but more often not we only use a couple. So I have horizontal type tool vertical type tool and then these other type mass tools, which I can't even remember the last time I used it, except to show someone why they shouldn't use it, because I can't imagine why you'd want to. But even with the horizontal type tool, there's a couple of different options. First of all, if you just do a single click, this is called point type, which means it will keep typing forest long as you type, and it will go right off the edge of your document because it doesn't know anything about margins or boundaries or anything like that. So if we add some text here, let's get into a more interesting font. Perhaps So I type some text. You see, it went right off the edge of the page because there is. That's what it does. That's what that regular type tool does. It does that by nature. So I want to make it fit. One thing that should mention right off the top that a lot of people I know it's when I watch people work. It's not obvious, so people don't sometimes catch. This is for example, I know I want to make the type smaller, but I also realize now maybe it's not quite in the right position. So a lot of people switch away from the type tool toe like the move tool, move it over and then go back to the type tool. But there's a subtle thing, and if your cursor is right on top of the type, you wouldn't notice this. But if you move your cursor far enough away, it becomes the move tool. So now you can just move the type over without switching tools. So if you ever in a position where you're want to just shift the type slightly, just move your mouse far enough away and you see the move tool and then it lets you do that. So I want to make this a smaller size. I just did a triple click, which selects whatever type is in there. So I don't have to drag across it and one of things that I do as much as possible in a photo shop anywhere where you see a field that has a number or a percent or some value, you always have a couple of choices. One is to click down and see if there's a list of existing sizes or percentages, or use something that I really love, which is called scrubby sliders. This is one of the best things that they brought out a photo shop a few years ago. Instead of trying to guess and say, Should it be 48? Should it be 36? I just positioned my cursor right above the letter T Zoom in a bit. You can see when I do that, see how the cursor changes to like a little pointing finger with arrows beside it. Now I could just drag, and it just change, lost me to change whatever size I want and that I'm showing you that in the context of type, but you'll find that works with opacity and any feature that you're using, whatever it iss. Okay, so in this case, I'm gonna go with this size for anyone who is new to working with type and Photoshopped. Anytime you're editing it, you have to eventually telephone and tell photo shop. You're finished so you can move on and do something else. So, for example, right now, every other menu, if I try to do something is all great out because as far as total shots concerned, I haven't finished with my type yet. So we have to commit the type and we can do that either by clicking on this little check mark up of the top. If you have an extended keyboard that has the keypad on it with the big, huge enter key, you can hit Enter. I'm using a laptop so I can't press return because if I press return, it would think I was doing the carriage return. But the shortcut is command or control. So McAbee command, enter window control. Sorry. McAbee Command, return control. Enter is just a keyboard shortcut way of saying not committed that type once the type is here in my layers panel. It's like any other layer so I can change the opacity. I can play with blend modes like an add a layer mask that can do effects to it in that way, because it's still considered a regular layer if I want to change anything else about it, for example, I feel like the letters are a little spread out. I want them to be a little tighter. In the world of type that's considered tracking. The space between letters across a series of letters is called tracking, so I want to tighten up the tracking. They're not a spread apart. They're closer together. And when we talk about these next couple of functions of tracking and turning and letting, which are all functions to do with type, there's always two ways to edit it. One is numerically, and the other is visually and for me personally, with rare exceptions. When it comes to the first couple like tracking, I don't hardly ever do it numerically because I don't know if it should be minus 10 or minus 40 year 10 or 15. So instead I use a keyboard shortcut and the keyboard shortcuts going to show you over the next few minutes. The nice part about them is it's the same set of keyboard shortcuts. It's just how you select the text that makes a difference. So right now, because I have all of my type selected. All I do is press option or old, and then I use the left arrow key and it tightens up the tracking. See how there's less space in between all the letters. If I will the right arrow key. It spreads out the tracking. Now. If I went looked in the character panel, it would tell me you just attracting of X and it would show me some number. So if you're really in tow, numerically ways of doing things, you could find out. Oh, that's 250 or 118 or whatever. I just look and go. I like it like that. So whatever that happens to be, and then I hit Enter our Sorry, the commander control a short cut to do that. Now that I have this, I want to move around now. I would have to switch to my move tool, since it's no longer active type once it's not active. It's like a regular layer of the way I move regular layers around is using the move tool. We talked yesterday a little bit about keyboard shortcuts and how they can make our life simpler. This is an example of one that bit of a stretch at first because the letter to select the move tool is V so I always say half jokingly v for move to help us remember that it's the move tool. Now the trick to this is, and this catches almost everyone when they're first turning. Trying to learn keyboard shortcuts is you have to make sure that you've committed the type first, because if you're typing and you press V for the move tool, you'll get a letter V on the end of your type, because it you know the type. Shortcuts only work if you're not typing text. So now that I've got the move to Elikann reposition to do whatever I want, one of things that's really important to remember about working with type and photo shop is it's a rare exception to the way everything worked in Photoshop. Almost everything we do in full shop is pixel based, so we have to be careful about. I don't want to blow that size up because I will lose quality type in photo shop is technically vector, so as long as it's a type player, Aiken shrink this down and make it big again and never have to worry about losing any quality. Don't be surprised if, on this screen at first you think, well, that looks a little soft. That's just a screen display thing because technically, if you're taking type while it's still a type player and scaling it up or down, that's just the equivalent of changing the type size. Can you add a texter? We'll talk about that a little later, so the answer is yes. Okay, so for now, we're just I'm both sort of setting up type, but eventually, yes, we will be able to do that. So, um, let's, uh, make this text a little bigger. You can also use the keyboard shortcut. By the way, if you're into keyboard shortcuts, thes go back to my early days of using this program. Some people may have heard of called Page Maker back in the day, which was our page layout, software command shift or control shift greater than is another way to just make the tight bigger without having to go up to the the top to do that. Now, when I look at this type, let's put over here Overall, it looks pretty good. But for some reason, to my eyes, the space between the H and the EE looks a little big. I don't know what is about those letter shapes is technically, that is appropriate spacing. But sometimes you'll find with particular type faces, it looks doesn't look so obvious. Actually, try to make this a little easier to see. The type won't make any sense, but I want to show you. For example, here's a good example when you have a capital letter T with a lower case. Oh, you really want to kind of tuck that Oh, underneath underneath the t a little bit because even though that's appropriate spacing visually, it doesn't look, shall we say, as pleasing as it could. So remember before I selected all my type and I used option and the arrow keys to change the overall tracking across it, I can also just do a single click in between. And then it's the same keyboard shortcut. It still option left arrow. But now all it's doing is changing the Kern ing, which is the space between a pair of letters. So this is a very common thing that that most type faces that you use if you just type normally it's technically correct, but visually a little off. Not always but the majority Tamar, especially with certain things like a capital T with a lower case vowel, because the end of the tea and the A just looks like the spacing of little off. Once you've done any of this kind of turning, then you could still play around with the overall size of the type or anything else. And it will continue to keep that individual pair Kernan that you've done and again, this can also be done numerically. However, I don't know that many people to do that unless their longtime typography people, and they just know in their head I should probably turn that minus seven. I'm like, Sure, I was gonna say eight, but okay, so for me, it's more of a visual thing, so I would probably track the whole thing a little tighter together, and now I think that looks a little better than it did before. So if we keep this, let's just change the color. So here's the thing you have to think about with type. If I want toe change the color of my type here, I could make sure I have my type. Will select the type and go into the options bar and change it. But remembering that by nature, once I've committed the type, it acts like a regular layer. So there are keyboard shortcuts. If you want to fill a layer, you can use the keyboard to do that without having to go to the fill command with having a go the type menu. So I here's my going. What's going through my head right now? I'm looking at the bottom of my tool bar, and I'm seeing that my four run color is black on my back from colors white. So I my keyboard shortcut brain clicks in, and I know that the keyboard shortcut to fill with the background color is command delete or control backspace. So commander lead on the Mac control back space. You have to select anything. I just press that shortcut and because it's tight. Technically, the only thing on the layer is that type. So the whole layer doesn't fill with white. It only fills the type with white. So any time you're experimenting where you just want to try changing the color, the alternative would be Take your type toe select attacks go into this color picker that works as well. But if you're trying to something simple like change it toe white To me, that was just a simpler way to do it. Okay, so the 1st 2 tracking and turning just is particularly the bigger the type, the mawr emphasis I would put on that. If you're doing little like 12 point type or something, you know, probably even notice that as much. This is really for bigger type. So this was created again by clicking once with my type tool. I want to now add some further type, and at this point, I'm just kind of let's call this a mock up. I don't have the actual text yet that's going to go in here, but I want to show someone. This is what your layout would look like for your Web graphic or whatever it might be that we're doing so now. I want to add some more type, but I want to create like a paragraph of type, and the hard way would be to still do a single insertion and then hit a carriage return at the end of every line. But then, if you change anything, it's all going to be out of whack because it's manually being sent to the next line instead of doing it automatically in the way we do it automatically. It's the same type tool, but said it clicking once you click and drag. Looks like I'm making, ah, marquee selection, but I'm really making a text box. So now when I typed text, it will automatically go over to the next line based on the width of this box. Now, depending on the version of photo shop you have, I want to say I apologize at this point where my brain starts to forget what version of photo shop they change something. I think it was CS six. So they added this where if you just want to get some text in there to see what it looks like, instead of just typing garbage text because I know if It's just me. But I find whenever I type gobbledygook tax my words air like 10 times longer than a real word. So it looks really awkward. So if you just go under here and choose paste Laura Ipsum this is just text that is random texted. It just puts in there. And if I make it a much smaller font size, you can see I have a bit of an issue here. There's way too much space between each line of type, and this is a very common thing that people run into a photo shop. And it can be frustrating cause it's not obvious as to why that's happened. Ever look at the options barred, saying, Well, it's 10 point type. Why is there such a big gap? And that's because when I first had made this text box, it remembered I had a much bigger type size automatically use a thing called letting to say the next line down is a percentage of the size of the type. So if my type was 80 the leading might be 90 which means it will put the next line far enough down to be spaced well because of Photoshopped recurring theme of remembering everything. It's still remembering that letting even though I made the type size smaller, it's still thinks the letting should be bigger. So if you want Teoh, see that in action, you can go to the character panel here, and it's showing it's getting closer, showing that I did 10 point type of my letting, which is the space between lines of type is still saying 70.4. So it needs to be much smaller. And again, I would just use scrubby sliders of see as I drag it in. Now I'm getting a much more reasonable amount of space between and a kind of a rule of thumb. If you just want regular spacing that what you owe in the typography will always to be 100 and 20%. So if it's 10 point type, that would be 12 point. Letting would be kind of typical if you want double spacing equivalent double space, and then you just sort of do the math from there. Or, of course, you could just do it completely visually as well. But what this has done for me, you can see now the type is automatically wrapping around to the next line. So if I take this type and I make it bigger or smaller, it's going to readjust everything. And the type continues to wrap a Roman see again. The leading is not automatically updated, so that's something I have to update. But what this does allow me to do is experiment. Say, what would the type look like if it was out here or this way? Because that a text block it automatically wraps around to the next line. So if you know you need more than one or two lines of type, this is ultimately going to be the simplest way for you to do it is to drag that box out and have that happen automatically.