Lessons

Lesson Info

Working with Type

I don't have anything specific to create right now we're just going to talk about type shapes and styles so first let's talk a little bit about ah using text there's a bunch of things you might not be aware of when it comes to the text tool and I hope to share a few tips with you first when use photo shops text tool there are two ways to create your text one is by clicking and letting go if you click and let go you are creating what I think is known as point type and what that means is when you type it's just going to keep going off the edge of your screen and it's going off into the middle of nowhere off the edge of my screen in order to get a good up to go down to the next line you hit the return key on your keyboard and create another line but it's going to go off the edge of my screen unless I hit the return key again and this is mainly useful when you're creating things that would be considered like headlines you know where you don't want it to be formatted in paragraphs and all t...

hat kind of stuff I'm going to get rid of that I'll just hit the delete key when I'm in the move tool and complete it the other way of doing texas instead of clicking and let it go click in drag and now you're defining a column so that is going to be limited to within that shape and won't let go I can still type in my text this might be a little large text wise let's bring it down a little bit but hopes up packing type match man usually I can take pretty quickly watch you usually don't have to look down e I get my fingers on the wrong keys gonna uh anyway if you click and drag you to find a column where your text will automatically rap around to the next line which could be nice but you have to click and drag to do so let's look at a few other tips when it comes to text sometimes you need a specific with fear column because you have specific standard you needed to be an inch and a half wide you need before inches wide whatever well with the text tool if you hold on the option kanan mac which is alton windows when you have that held down if you click with the text tool it'll ask you for a size and in here the default measurement system it's going to at the moment is points because text is usually measured in points but you can type in other measurements let's say come in here and say I want four and I'll just type I n for inches and then I'll hit tab to go to the next field it'll automatically converted to the measurement system that was in there, so I'm going to say four by six inches of click, okay? And now it just created one of exactly that size that makes as I didn't actually need a thing of text like that, though. Uh, let's see, I'll go back to my textile now, let's work with point text where I just click and I type it out where it got us off the edge of my screen. Well, when it comes to the text, I find that oftentimes people end up after typing in the text, messing with a size to say, oh, that was a little too small to large or anything else, will you? Sure, you can go up to the size, and the first thing you'll need to do is before changing the size type command a for select also it knows to change all of the text, and then it's not very helpful. Tohave the text reversed like this, where it shows you that it's highlighted so you can usually type command h for hyde that's control agent windows. Now on a macintosh, the very first time you type command age, it will usually ask you this question, and that is because the mac in top macintosh operating system already uses command h internally to hide whatever application you're in. That's its default behavior in photo shop is asking do you want it to do what the mac os expects it to do or would you rather have it do what photoshopped expects it to dio because photoshopped like ten years ago twenty years ago command age I hid things like selections and other things in on lee more recently tio tio apple add it to the operating system so I'm going to hit hide extras and that way when I type command age I can have that text still selected but when I type command age I don't see the highlighting even though it is selected okay then you can go up here and change your size you could click on the size and use the up and down arrow keys if you want to do that to change it and larger increments hold down the shift key just think of shift means turbo and it's going to go more grass if it does it in increments of ten instead of increments of one but I eve don't even like that so instead I don't even have to select on my text that same just working on it what you can do is if you hold down the command key which could stroll on windows move your mouse near the edge of your text like right here and if you have the command key held down while you're in the type tool you can just click right there in pole and make it bigger so instead it's like you're transforming it is if you're in free, transform and usually you'll see the little line below your texts and things, but I take command h in a way where it doesn't seem to want to come back. I don't know why I usually it would come back when I just type command h but it's not, but I just hold on the command key get near the edge usually the lower right is where I go to and I can then start to scale now let's say, I've gone in here in I have got my text, we'll move it over a little bit and I'm in the textile working on this. Usually if you move your mouse somewhere else outside of the tax and you click it thinks you want to move this around, but sometimes with the text to will. What I need to do is create like ten different blocks a taxed, and it seems like it wants me to switch out of this tool and back into the tool in order to be able to add another a thing of text, another block of text, because when I move my mouse away from here, it gets me in the move tools so I can reposition this well, all you need to do is hold on the shift key if you're in the text tool, you're already working on some text, just hold on the shift key and click somewhere else. Somehow my text got awfully small. Yeah, this hold down the shift key click somewhere else it doesn't seem to like to remember what size I was using, uh, hold down the shift key, click somewhere else, you know, and you can continuously make more and more blocks of text that could speed you up if you're used to having you create a bunch of them and get frustrated by what's happening. The other thing you could do is if you want to say you're done working with this text, usually if you hit the return key and your keyboard, you cause it create a new line of text, but if you hit the enter key under keyboard, not return but enter then it usually thinks you're done with that text so that now you're doing something else in fact, uh, I can then click somewhere else to add more now if you're on a laptop or you just have a small keyboard in general and you don't have the enter key, which is usually over by your numeric keypad or something like that, at least on a macintosh laptop, if I look at my return key on the same key printed and smaller letters above it but on the same key, it says, enter and what that means is in order to get the functionality of the enter key, all you need to do is on your keyboard on a mac laptop there's a function key in the lower left, just labeled f n if I hold that down and hit the return key, it does the same as enter mean, it becomes an in turkey. All right, a few more random tips about working with text if you're in any tool doesn't matter which one and you have a layer that contains text doesn't even have to be the active layer it's just there's one in your document if you double click on the letter t right here it's going to automatically switch you to the text tool it's gonna automatically make that type active and it's going to select all so just double click on the letter t and that means make the textile active select all the text, then of course, I could type command h to hide that so that I don't have to see the highlighting. Uh, change the fun you can click on the font field a lot of people are used to use in the pop up menu, I got a few fonts installed my wife karen, though, has about nine times as many but what you can do is if you want to get to a particular font, just select the whole range attacks that's in there and just start typing the fun you want um I don't know five future installed by funhouse hey, but I just type, so I just started typing the name of the font I wanted I typed the word fun you can also cycle through the fonts that aaron the menu by just using the up and down arrow keys so I just down there okey this and it will show that was getting up on that yet and I could just arrow through all afonso if you want to see which one hey, um you might think would work best? You don't have to sit there and go to the menu and go through it each time. All right, then let's say we have some relatively normal looking text well, usually in order to manipulate the text, you need to work with the type related features in a photo shop, which means usually you need to you can click on this little icon and your tool bar up in here and get to your character and your paragraph settings but that's not always the most convenient way of working with text because with this it feels more like you're in a page layout program in with page layout program usually I'm creating rather ordinary looking text because it's going to be in a brochure, a magazine or something else and it's very organized and everything where's the photo shop I often like being overly creative with my text and I don't want to be stuck with all these features so let's see if there's something else I can do that's going to help me be able to work with this in a different way? Well, with my text layer active if I go too uh, I think I can find it under the type menu there's a choice here called convert to shape convert to shape in this means don't make this act like text anymore make it act as if I made it using the pen tool or the shape tools and photo shop and we'll cover the shape tools and more depth in a few minutes. So if I choose convert to shape now that's no longer text I can no longer change any of the letters I can no longer change funt, but I can go to my tool panel and go down here to the selection tool here and it's going to highlight each one of those letters and if I come in I can click on individual letters now and if I want to do a little bit more interesting typography, I just click on the individual letters and organize them however I'd like that means I can also hold down the shift key to get another letter moved to together. I can also go to the edit menu and we have free transform that means I could rotate this I can grab the edge here and scale it just hold down the shift key so you don't distort it in one direction unless you want to pull it way out if I wanted to start it just one way and all that kind of stuff, but these are no longer stuck thinking about text, you just want to be in the one it looks like a black um, carol to move these now what if I move one of these letters so that it overlaps another one? Well, let's click on this letter and let's move it so that it overlaps the one that that's next to it with default settings the to just kind of combined together because he won't see this outline when you print this or you see it another program so that little overlap is just showing you where the edge of one layer overlaps another. But if I click away, you'll see they're solid well, I can take this tax and let's say select going to select a bunch of these letters by just dragging a rectangle around them at the top of my screen there is an icon right here in that icon controls what happens where one letter overlaps the other right now it says they should just combine together, but if I tell it to exclude the overlapping shapes, that means make it make a hole where the two overlap. So if I choose that choice now, wherever I make one letter intersect another, you'll see it punches a hole in it, which could make things a little bit more interesting the pain on what kind of design you're going for, but that's only if we've converted them into shapes and organize them. However we like all right, s o I find doing that could be real nice, but now the problem is I want to add let's say, a drop shadow what I could do is go down to the letters f ax and sure, I can say that I want a drop shadow, but it's going to treat every one of those let those letters as being on the exact same ah layer because they are. So what if I take some letters here and I tell them that I don't want them to create holes where they overlap? I just wanted to combine, but now if I overlap them overlap one on the other, I don't get the drop shadow where the letter f overlaps letter are I just don't have the shadow what's going on there well, I can click on one of these and you remember there's a way to copy something to its own liar command j well, the problem with that is it does copy it leaves the original behind I want to do the similar thing but I don't want to leave the original behind so I'm going to go to the layer menu and when you type command j it's really a keyboard shortcut for this thing laywer via copy seek man j but there is a choice called layer via cut which means remove it off the layer it's on currently put it on a new layer above keyboard shortcut is just like command j just add the shift key so I'm gonna type shift command j watch my layers panel when I type shift command j I just have the letter are selected it just popped it onto its own layer so that now I could say that the letter r should be underneath by dragging underneath and now do you see the shadow there from the letter f falling onto the letter r because it's on a layer underneath and therefore it's thought of as being lower so if I want to create a bunch of text I want to go to that uh air o'toole target the layer that contains the taxed click on each letter and do shift command j and then go to the layer that contains the rest of that text click on a letter shift command j now these air all in separate layers so that I could come over here and move them around. I keep switching over to this one let me go, okay, I can move these around now and depending on what the stacking order is in my layers panel, I'm going to get furious put this down below shadowing effects so that you can stack up your text and make it sometimes look more interesting. I'm not saying this is the most exciting texas for his font color and what it says, but you get the idea that if you ever do come up with the interesting headline with the right font with the right color and it's just feeling really flattened, it feels like you're in a page layout program doesn't feel like you're in photo shop where you can have fun, then you might want to consider converting to shape, and after converting to a shape, you can get the individual letters on their own layers by simply clicking with that solid arrow tool. And then it was shift command j that shift control j and windows toe pop him on their own layers, and then we can move them around, and with that solid arrow tool clicking on each letter, you don't even have to switch what layer is active? It will automatically do the switch for you when you click because it just looks at what's underneath your mouse, what layer contains that and we can easily change he's around, but does that make sense overall little more flexibility there in what you're doing? So then I'm going to get rid of this text is looking pretty boring and let's put something new in there let's choose ah different color for our text maybe grab your text tool you knew it was coming remember you can hold down the command key when you're in the text tool and that gives you where you can grab the corner here and if you grab the corner if you just grab the edge up here you could just stretch it out you can even make it go downhill if you want, but if you grab the corner in pole, you could stretch it one direction or both directions hold shift to keep the proportions appropriate because it's just like when you're transforming with free transform usually have to hold shift otherwise you khun stretch one direction more than the thie other looks like I didn't get thie color that I wanted, so I'll change it at the top of my screen and by not changing oh, I bet you we have a great skill document I'm almost certain yes it's hard to have read text when you're in a great scale document don't flatten and now one last attempt all right. Other things we can do when it comes to text when you're in the type to elicit the letter t to get their atop your screaming yet all these options across the top and one of them is this one here we can warp our text, and when it comes up, all I did was click on an icon up there for warping. Uh, if you ever wanted arc text, slight arc or anything else, you have all sorts of different shapes you can use here. Feel free if you have more than one line attacks, sometimes that arcs a little bit better, and after doing so, you can always convert to a shape if you need to do more to it, but that's going to give you kind of a generic bend to your text, sometimes you don't want the actual letters within the text to become distorted. So if you don't want the actual letters in the text to become distorted, what we could do instead is I can use my shape tool if I go down on my shape tool, I have all these different shapes available. I'm going to go and choose the ellipse tool. And when you use this shape tool the top your screen you can tell it what kind of thing you'd like to end up with a shape a path or just to have it filled in with pixels and if I end up using a shape or a path look, I think I don't want that filled in, so I'm going to use a path I could do this and then if I grab my text tool as long as that path is active if I move my text to a right near the edge of it, you'll see the icon change if I move it in here it thinks that when I type in my text that shape should contain my text just like a column would contain text but it's in a shape so you could have text that's wrapping within the shape of teapot or whatever kind of shape you want, he farted. Click there if I moved to the edge though and get right out there where my icon changes I can click and now I'm actually rapping text and I have it sitting there right now with that if the place where you originally clicked too apply your text isn't quite where you wanted it. If you go to the very beginning your text, you'll see a little circle there, but if you try to mouse over it, it seems like you can't grab it it seems like if you click it thinks you want to select some of the text, but if you hold down the command key the same key that allowed me to grab the corner and scale, you should be able to click right on that circle and either put it on the opposite side of the circle by dragging in like I just dragged to the inner part of the circle versus the outer part. Or you should be able to drag along the circle to position that wherever you'd like it to start. But if you wanted to go on the inside, just dragged to the inside my mouth's right now, is it in the middle of the circle, whereas now my mouse's outside the circle and then drag across the line to control where that applies, and so that way it's not going to distort the overall shape of the letters it's going to place them along that path? Usually when I do that, I have to select all and in my type settings there's a setting for tracking. Tracking is I believe this one right here and tracking controls. If it's going to add extra space in between each letter or not, and I usually have to track out my text a bit, take that to make it more legible. Otherwise the letters seem to be jumbled together ah, way too much so we have the choice of warping text. Or we have the choice of putting it on a shape it's up to you as faras, which one you feel like doing. But I find that a lot of times, that's. Not very obvious how you do that stuff, because first, you have to know to get the shape up there. Then you have to know to move to just the right place, to get it, to kind of lock it into it.