Photoshop Type Tool

Photoshop Type Tool (shortcut T) is the how everybody create smooth text graphics. Adding texts in images is a Must Learn thing for all Photoshop Users. There's no limitation to the amount of text you type, just play around with this tool and you'll learn it better.

Press T on your keyboard to select the Type Tool and right click on it as shown below:

As you can see there are different Type Tools avilable. I guess the first two are self-explaining. I'll start with Horizontal Type Tool. Create a new document in Photoshop. File >> New, Width: 800, Height: 600 (pixel) and Pres Ok. Press D on your keyboard to set the Color Palette to default (black/white) color. Now with the Type Tool selected click anywhere on the new document.

Now type in a text. I'll type Adobe Photoshop Type Tool. It'll look like this.

Look at the Type Tool Options Box:

The font I've selected is Arial, you can try any other font. The font styles avilable for this font are Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic. Font Size is 36 pt. There are four anti-aliasing options for texts in Photoshop. They are Sharp, Crisp, Strong, Smooth. Let's select Smooth this time. The three buttons after anti-aliasing are Allignment buttons. If you use Microsoft Word or any other text editor, you must know these allignment options. Then there is Font Color. Let's select a blue color for our text. For all the text to change their color, you need to select all of them. Press Ctrl+A to select the text and click on the Black Box to change the color. Then press the Enter key on the Number Pad side of your keyboard. The main Enter key is used to give a line feed while typing. Here's what I've done

For the exact same color, go to the color dialog box like you did by clicking on the black box and give 008aff as input in a text box besides a # symbol. These are color codes, each code is for a specific color. See below:

Play around with the colors. You can give seperate colors to each letter of the text. Do some coloring to endup with something like this.

I'm sure you can get results better than that. The next button in the options box is Create Wrapped Text . With the type tool selected, click on this tool and a dialog box will be displayed. I've typed in "PicFix - The Photoshop Blog" as my text. From the new dialog box that appeared, click on the Style drop down menu, and select one from the menu. I did a Bulge with the following settings:

and I and ended up like this:

Keyboard shortcuts don't work while you're typing because Photoshop thinks the input is a text to be typed in not the shortcut. To end typing don't press the Return (enter) key. This will give a line feed while you're typing and you type from a new line. Instead press the Enter key on the NumPad of your keyboard. This will exit type mode. If the Numpad is not avilable then just select any other Photoshop Tool from the tool box and you exit the type mode.

Vertical Type Tool is similar, try it yourself. The difference is that the text is typed vertically in this case. I'll explain about the Type Mask Tools later in Layers section.

Get your hand around with the type tool. It's very important to get used to this tool as you'll need it in majority of image editing. Here's a simple and quick tutorial to Add text in an Image. I hope you'll get used to the type tool quicker than I did.