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Placing Type

Lesson 36 from: Practical Adobe Photoshop Basics

Khara Plicanic

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Lesson Info

36. Placing Type

Next Lesson: Setting Type

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

08:02
2

Tips for Success

05:53
3

How To Undo Mistakes

06:05
4

Adobe Workspace

16:01
5

Using The Brush Tool

03:33
6

Using The Zoom Tool

04:25
7

Adobe Preferences

02:27
8

Correcting Exposure

19:15

Lesson Info

Placing Type

So now we're gonna be talking about type and typography, And how do we add text to our images? And I love the section. So I hope you guys are ready for fun. Um, I did not include the fonts and those course files because I can't distribute them. But I did include links to all of the fonts that I'm using. So if you would like to get them and use the same fonts and all of that, you can certainly do that. So hopefully we'll discover some new favorite funds. I have quite a collection I've grown over the years. All right, so we're gonna add some type to this image. And as you might expect, we do that with the type tool which is located, or right here on the toolbar, So t for type and you'll notice if you click and hold on this to older are lots of different versions of this tool. There is the horizontal type tool, the vertical type tool, and then a mask version of each of those. And we're just gonna be using the horizontal type tool. The vertical type tool is here not for you to take type in...

the western world and make it run vertically stacked on top of itself. This is for parts of the world where the language is actually are written vertically. So if you want, like, here, for example, if you were gonna put type on the spine of a book, you still wouldn't use this. This will stack the letters vertically. That's a whole different thing. So that is intended for languages where they're written vertically. So in this case, that will be using the horizontal type tool. And there are two different ways to put type out onto your page. So we're gonna take a look at both of those methods. The first is just creating what's called point type. So to do that, I'm just going to position my cursor right up in this area and you'll notice it looks like an open book that lets me know I will be creating a new type player when I click. So I'll put my cursor here and I'll just click. And what has happened is that over here in the layers panel, we get this layer with a big tea right here. So this is letting me know that I've added type layer and I have a flashing cursor over here. Um, waiting for me. The input type. I'm going to type out, Um, the phrase the perfect pair. Um and I guess you could be funny and spell it like this to people do that a lot, of course, with, like, wedding things. They think that's fun. And it's kind of in the EU's pairs. But in this case, I'm gonna spell it like a pair pair that we have here, and we'll go ahead and commit this type. So when you type the text out onto your page, who knows what fun it's gonna come out in whatever you use last, Um and we're going to style it in a minute. But right now I'm just typing it out and you'll notice that it's all in one line. The way that we created this type player with was with just a click, right. That creates point type, which will just continue on the same line of type forever unless you manually break the line by pressing enter. So it's kind of like a typewriter. It just goes to the end, and that's it. So it's best used for single lines of type, as in this case. So when I'm happy with the type I've put out there, I need to commit the type before it can do anything else. So while I need to basically deactivate this cursor that's sitting here waiting So to do that I can come up in the options and click the check mark right here or if I want to use my keyboard unlike when we're transforming something and we press enter in this case because it's type enter will give me a line break. So it when you're doing type and you want to commit its command or control, enter on your keyboard. Okay, Now I can use the move tool, and I can move this around and do a number of things. Um, but we can also change the typeface up in the options bar when I have the type tool active. I see my choices up here. So this fun is sewing right up here. If I want to change it, I can just put my cursor right into this box, and I'm gonna to The funt called. What about using for this love line? Love line. Irregular. So I'm just gonna click to select that and you'll see that the font changes to reflect that. If I wanted to change the size, I could also do that here. I happen to have already decided that I wanted 65 points. But of course, as we talked about yesterday, this is all trial and error and you experiment. But I have decided I like this. And, um, I should point out we haven't had to highlight anything like in Microsoft Word. You know, if you're typing away and then you're like, Oh, I want to make this change The spot you have tow, select all the foreign, all the characters, like everything you've typed, and then you change it. Well, in photo shop, you can do that. But in this case, because I've put the type all in one layer right here, I don't have to actually have the type active. I don't have to have my cursor in the box actively waiting the highlight things to change the font or the size or the color. I can just come up here and change it. And because this layer is selected in the layers panel, it will just change. So for example, I could come up here. These are a bunch of fonts I have. And I could just, like, scroll through them using my arrow keys, and I can just see it changing. We're just kind of nice. Um, but I'm gonna stick with my love line for now. Or love luck. No, that wasn't it. Why do I have funds with such similar names? Love line? Yeah. Love line regular. Okay, that's when you know you have too many funds. All right, let's change the color, then, Um, the easiest way. There's kind of two ways you would normally think you could come down here and just to the color. But actually, the text gets its color from up here so I could click up here. And, um, I could choose, you know, to make this white and click OK, or another thing, but I like to do is to actually sample my colors from within the image. So for this little piece, I imagined that we were creating, like, a little magazine editorial layout or something. Um, or maybe a little postcard piece for prepares. Baby repair, former. So we're going to create this little piece, and, um It's just nice when it's beautiful and looks like it's well pulled together and color can really help with that. So I'm going to click the box up here in the options bar, and instead of choosing a color right in here, I'll just mouse over my image and I'm actually gonna say Suck this little the green right off of the pair. So just by mousing over my cursor turns into an eyedropper, and then I could just click and see the color that I've selected and maybe a you know, I can click over here and maybe I decide I like it better. You can click around and try different things, but I kind of like this light green. So I'm gonna go with that and click. OK, so all of that was accomplished without having to highlight the text, which I think is really handy. Okay, so that was point text. So we just clicked once with the type tool to create that. Now we're going to create what's called paragraph type. So this is what you might be used. Teoh. If you have ever worked in any sort of layout kind of publication or layout software, like in design or something where you actually have to take the type and contain it in a box. So to do that, I'll come down here with my cursor, and instead of just clicking, I will click and drag to create a box. And now I'm gonna reduce the size. Teoh. I don't know, 12 or 13 when you're changing the size, there's several ways to do it, and we'll look at some other methods later. But you can just click this drop down and select from the presets. Or you could type a number into this box. So maybe 13. And I'm going to change the type to, um, coat with the called Coates Regular. I think it's what I went with. And instead of trying to type something specific into this box, I'm gonna fill it. What's what with what is called placeholder type. If you're a designer, you probably are familiar with placeholder type. Placeholder type is what you use when you're waiting for the whoever sending you the actual copy to put the copy in place. The actual text it's often referred to as copy. So when you don't have the actual copy, but you can't wait until you get it. To do your design, you use placeholder type or when you're teaching a class and you just wanna have a nice paragraph there, you use placeholder time. So it's called Laura Ipsum, and you can actually come up to the type menu and choose Paste Laura Um Ipsum, which is just gibberish. Basically, it's not any language. It's just gibberish, but it looks like language, and if we look at this, we can see that mine is looking a little bit odd. It's It's not appearing centered in this box as we would expect, because photo shops really almost annoyingly good at remembering settings that you've tweaked. And apparently, when I was messing around last night, I shifted the baseline, so I was going to show you this later. But I'll show you now because I have to fix it. So when I pasted this in instead of setting on the lines where it would normally said, it's setting below, that's why it looks funny. So let's fix that. So because I'm actively in this type box, I do need to highlight it to select, to shift the baseline so I'll come over to my, um, character panel. You can access it if if you don't have it on your screen, you can access it from the window menu and choose character. Or you can also get it within your type tool. If you click up here in the toolbar, there's a little shortcut to it as well right up here. But it's called the character panel, and there's a number of settings here that we will look at more closely later, like I planned. But right now the problem that I'm having is that my baseline is shifted downwards 47 points. So I'm just going to change that to zero. And now this looks more more like what we might have expected. Okay, so then I'll go ahead and commit this and there we have it. Now let's talk about how the two different types of layers that we've created are different. The 1st 1 that we created was just a single line of type, so there was no box around it. It was like a typewriter where you have to hit return to make the lines go down. So that's best used for just like this. Just a single line of text, whereas this is like a paragraph. So for this type player, we clicked and dragged to define a box for the type to live in. This type, by contrast, does not have a box. It just sits on the line. So that's point type. If we want to change the color of this type here, uh, we can do the same thing. We could click here and change the color, and it will just update the whole layer. But let's say that we want to actually change just certain words within this paragraph. Then we actually do need to put our cursor into the type and highlight it the same we would dio like in Microsoft Word. So to do that, I just positioned my cursor somewhere on top of this text, and I click once to pop the text box open to reactivate the textbooks. So we'll see the box appear again if we wanted to change the size of the box. Maybe I don't like the way the lines are breaking here. I could squish it less, or I could widen it or, you know, make it shorter. Whatever you have a question. Yes, Why? That is that in a box on there was in the line. That was because of how we created the type player. So up at the top, we just used the mouth and clicked once. And then we get a line to create the box text. We clicked and dragged with the type tool to make a box, and then it is a different beast than it has a box. And then we type within a box. So it's, I mean, they're both type, but it's nice sometimes, especially if you're doing some design work and you don't want to mess around with all of the settings for letting and baseline shifting and stuff that I'll show you in a minute. Um, it's nice to just manage all those different bits of type separately and have them just be on the line by themselves. So for years, I never did it this way. I always put things in boxes for like ever, and I would despise when I would sometimes get files from other people that I had to work on and they would have type. That was on a just a line. I just hated it. I just I don't know why, I guess because they would do it for lots of even bigger pieces of type. It's great for just a word or two, but when you need Type two break like this and have multiple lines, it's an editing nightmare. If it's not in a box because in a box, if I need to delete like this whole section, I can delete it and everything else will shift. But when you do the type on a line like this and you manually put in the returns, you have to manually edit all of those line breaks. And so anyway, use them the way they were intended for either short like lines of type. Just one single line of type or or put it in a box. Any time you're basically gonna have more than one line of type, click and drag to give it a box, you can actually convert between the two, um, somewhere over here under the tight menu, I think convert it just saw it here. It is so not right now because I'm actively in the type box. But if I set the type, as long as you just select the layer, I mean I guess I'll just show you. You select the layer, you can come to the tight menu and choose convert to point type. And then, conversely, I could select the point type player and convert it to paragraph text, so you have flexibility. But all right, so let's say now that we want to either, you know, resize the box or shift this around a little bit. You can do that by just clicking to reactivate it and then stretch the box or collapse the box or adjust the box as you want to. But let's say that we want these 1st 2 words in this paragraph right here that we want them to be bold. Let's say so. I would select them just like you wouldn't word. You just click and drag to highlight those, and then I can come up in my options bar. And if my father has a bold option, I could make it bold. In this case, it doesn't so I could choose to make it right, Alec. If I wanted, I could then also change the size. Let's say so. Maybe instead of 13 points, I could choose a drop down here. I could type in a number or one of my personal favorites, and I don't I wish that in design had this and it doesn't. But in photo shop you can do. It's called scrubbing, and I think it's so fun. So if you hover your cursor on top of the little type, the tea's right here. You get this double headed hand pointer, whatever you call that, Um, and you can click and just drag and you'll see that it woo it scales. Um, and it used to visually update as you did that. So I don't know if I changed the studying somewhere, but it used to like, as you were dragging, you would see it get bigger, so I don't know. But sometimes when you get a brand new new release, they work out some of those kinks. So maybe that's coming back in an update somewhere. But, um, so you can you can scrap as well to change the size of your text, so I'll describe this a little bit bigger, and then maybe I'll change this color. Maybe this instead of being green. Maybe I want just these two words to be this color from the pair, so I'll come up here in the options bar, clicked pop, open the color picker and little mouse over the pair and choose something different. Maybe something like that, and then click. OK, and when I'm happy with all of it, I'll click the check mark. And today, ah, some other options that you might want to change. In this case, I was using a center alignment, but you know, we could left aligned this or center or right or whatever. So these settings are right up here. In your options. There's more settings available, as we'll see in a minute in the character panel, but the commonly used ones are available up here. And because this type is all on its own layer, I don't have to highlight it to change it. I can just as long as that layers active. I can just change it right here.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts
Photoshop Resource Guide
Practical Photoshop Basics (PS action file)
Word Art
Course Files

Ratings and Reviews

Kim Williams
 

I tuned into this class hoping to glean what I cold since it was free. I ended up purchasing the class because it is FILLED with so much great information in a fun and easy to understand format. Khara is an amazing instructor - I thoroughly enjoyed every minute. Worth EVERY penny. Thank you Creative Live for offering such great material, at even more amazing prices.

smurfy
 

What an unbelievable teacher Khara is. I have wanted to learn photoshop forever but was intimidated, overwhelmed, then I watched this course. OMG I learnt so much, more then I imagined. I am so excited now to start using Photoshop, I can't wait to try out everything she taught us. With the skills we learnt over these two days I think this course provides everything I need to know to feel and more. She was outstanding, the absolute perfect teacher for someone who has never ever used Photoshop. Also great moderation by Kenna. Thank you for this awesome, amazing, wonderful course. I am sure anyone who watches this course will agree it is incredible. I couldn't recommend it more. This course was just Smurfy!

Roz Fruchtman
 

I would highly recommend Khara Plicanic's Practical Adobe Photoshop Basics. The name of the class, implies that the class is for beginners, but that's not exactly true. Most of us learn Photoshop by the features we need to know at any given time. As many will agree, there are a number of ways to get to the same end. I can only speak for myself, but... I would bet that many of us don't know all the strategies that are taught in this class! Check it out, I doubt you'd be disappointed! Khara brings a fun and relatable approach to everything she does. She is very entertaining, while being a superb instructor. Last, but not least... This class brings with it a ton of useful bonuses. Warm Regards, Roz Fruchtman aka @RozSpirations

Student Work

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