Working Text Tools In Photoshop

Working with Text in Photoshop

The tools that Photoshop runs for manipulating text are perhaps its most straightforward features.

You just select the text tooltext tool, click, and drag, and you are ready to type.

When you participate the type tool, what you type automatically becomes its own layer and is given what is typed as a layer name. This is a very helpful feature when dealing with multiple text layers. Double click the T to easily edit the text.

If you want to merge a text layer with an image layer, the text layer must be rasterized, or converted to an image first. Once this is done, you can no longer edit the text. Unless you are using text in an illustration or altering letters, this may not even be necessary.

Using Layer Pane

Layer Management

The most difficult part of working in Photoshop for me to master when I first used it was how to work in a document on multiple layers. Though you can perform an uncanny number of operations using the layers pane and menus, I'll only go over the basics to reduce beginner's confusion.

Layers Pane

The layers pane is one of the panes that it's best to keep visible at all times. If you don't see it when you open Photoshop, goto window> show layers and it will be restored.

A note on working with jpeg file copied from other applications: If you've pasted in a jpg image, you'll notice that there is only one layer. If you open a jpeg image, this layer will be called "background" and will have a lock icon demonstrating that it is locked. In order to unlock it, double click on the layer name in the layer pane and change the name. The layer is now unlocked. Depending on how you plan to alter this image, it may be a good idea to leave this layer alone, and do your work on other layers.

Adding New Layers

OK, as I said earlier, you can think of the layers as clear pages overlaying each other. The layers pane provides a good visualization of this concept because the layers appear in the layers pane as they are organized in the document. To demonstrate this, we'll add a new layer and type a little on it.

Go to Layer> and Select New Layer. Type a name for the layer in the dialog box that appears and hit enter. It should now appear in the layers pane (but since it is currently empty, there will be no sign of it in the image. Select the text tool from the tool bar and click & drag somewhere on the image (making sure the new layer is still highlighted in blue).

Selecting Layers

Select the Type tool (which I'll detail shortly) and type a little. You can see that the type appears on top of the image (i'll explain more about type a little later) . Now, we'll use these two layers to learn how to use the layers pane.

For starters, on the top text layer, click the eye icon. You'll see that it toggles the layer between show and hide. When you click on the paintbrush next to it, which represents that this is the layer you're currently working on, nothing happens. Now click on the name of the layer below. You see that the paintbrush now shows on the new active layer.

You can click on the empty paintbrush box to lock and unlock layers to avoid unwanted changes. The squiggle means it's locked.

Arranging Layers

Also, you can manually arrange the layers. Click and drag your text layer underneath the original image layer. You'll see that the text no longer appears. That is because it is now located behind the opaque image layer.

I already showed you one way to add a layer, but there's a quicker and easier way. Just click on the dogeared page icon at the bottom of the layers pane. You can double click on this layer's name to change it. If you want to delete a layer, you can either drag it to the trash icon at the bottom of the layers pane or select the layer and click the trash icon.

Combining ("Merging") layers

Sometimes you'll want to combine the contents of two layers onto one layer. Select the layer you want to be on top of the new merged layer, make sure the other layer you'd like to merger is directly beneath it, and select Merge Down from the Layer menu. The two layers are now one. If you want to merge down an entire file of layers, select "Flatten image" from the layers menu, and then all layers will be squashed into one.

When you merge or flatten layers that contain text layers, you will be asked whether you'd like to rasterize that text (that is, convert it to an image and lose the ability to edit it). I find it's a good idea to copy any layers and hide them before you rasterize and merge. It saves you the work of completely recreating layers if you decide to change text.

Using Image Menu

Using Image Menu

Most basic Photoshop tasks involve the Image menu, which I showed you earlier. In this chapter of the tutorial, I’ll go a little deeper into what you can do with the Image menu. I'm skipping around a little here; this represents the most commonly used items on the Image menu.

Mode

The first item on the Image menu is Mode. This is what you use to change the color mode and appearance on the entire image. I discussed RGB, the web mode, and CMYK, the print mode, earlier. You have some other choices here, including grayscale and duotone. Some modes’ availability depends on the pre-existing color mode.

Adjust

You can see that the adjust option on the Image menu gives you a lot of different tools for adjusting your image. The most basic types of adjustments you can make with Photoshop involve colors and brightness.

The most simple is the contrast/brightness adjustment. When you select contrast/brightness, you are confronted with a dialog box with a slider for both brightness and contrast. Moving the sliders to the left makes the picture more murky or darker, and moving the sliders to the right brightens and increases the contrast between the dark and light colors in the image. You can play around with both sliders until you get a suitable mix; the change is previewed in the image. This tool is helpful for brightening pictures that were taken in low light.

The other adjustments you can make with the options on the adjustments menu are a little more complex, and the best way to learn about them is just to experiment. Because Photoshop allows you to preview your adjustments, you can get a good feel for the adjustments without hurting your image.

    Another common basic feature of Photoshop that lives on the Image menu is image size. You use this function to resize an image, and it’s pretty straightforward. When you select image size from the Image menu, a dialog box appears with some numbers corresponding to the current size.

    You'll notice that there are two sets of sizes, Pixel Dimensions and Document Size. Pixel Dimensions refers to the image's size on screen, and Document Size refers to the size at which the document will print.You'll notice that all the numbers change when you change one of them. This default setting preserves the original h/w ratio of your image when you make changes to it size. If you want to change only one dimension of the image, uncheck the "constrain proportions" checkbox at the bottom of the dialog.

    Notice that in the Documents size settings, you have the option to change the resolution (remember, things images will always be approximately 72 pixels/inch on screen). You can use this to change the resolution of your image, but remember, if you don't want the quality to decrease, you should only go from hi-res to low-res.

    Canvas Size is similar to Image Size, but changes to an image's canvas size can provide you with more working area for your image, in case you want to annotate it, copy more images into it, or perform. any number of other graphic variations.

   

    The Crop function in the image menu is fairly straightforward. Make a selection, go to Image and select crop, and then everyting outside your selection disappears. The image size reflects the change.

Using Toolbox Many others Purpose

Now it's time to learn how to use some of the tools in the Photoshop toolbar.

Marquee Selection tools:

The following tools allow you to select regions in your image to alter, copy, move, and apply filters.

Rectangular marquee tool: This is the default selection setting. You can make a selection of any rectangular size and shape.

Elliptical marquee tool:

This tool, available when you click and hold down on the selection tool region of the tool bar, selects elliptical spaces. To select a round area, hold the shift key while clicking and dragging.

Single row: This tool will select a 1pixel region that is as wide as your image. Very useful for trimming edges and making straight lines.

single column marquee tool:

Single column: 

The tool will select a 1pixel region that is as tall as your image. Also very useful for trimming edges and making straight lines.

A Note on Selection Modes (in the options bar):

marquee tool styles

Normal mode allows you to drag the cursor to create the selection size you want.

Constrained aspect ratio allows you to choose a scalable rectangle, say with a width to height ratio of 1 to 2. The selection will grow when you drag, but will remain the same shape.

Fixed Size/Fixed Aspect Ratio allows you to predetermine the size, in pixels or a ratio, of the selection you will make. When you click with fixed size selected, a selection box of the exact size you specified will automatically appear. With fixed aspect ratio, you can make different-sized selections of the same shape. This is a particularly helpful tool when cropping images to a certain size or drawing identical boxes.

move tool

Move Tool

the move tool moves an entire layer at a time. When you have selected this tool, click on a layer in the layer pane, and then click and drag on the image. The current layer will move all at once. You can even move it outside of the current image size. Don't worry, though, parts of an image that move outside the borders still exist - they are just hidden. They will only be cropped out if you flatten the image.

Lasso tools

The lasso selection tools are similar to the marquee tools, except that the lasso tools give you ultimate freedom in terms of the shape of your selection. There are three different lasso tools:

lasso toolLasso tool, which allows you to draw a selection by dragging the cursor freehand. The selection will close itself

Polygon lasso tool

Polygon Lasso tool, which creates a selection composed of straight lines that can be as short as one pixel. The selection grows with each additional click. This tool is especially useful for cutting out objects in an image to place on new backgrounds.

magnetic polygon lasso tool:Magnetic Polygon Lasso tool works a little like a combination of the other two lasso tool. As you drag, the selection maps to natural borders in the image. This is a useful tool when dealing with well-defined and high-contrast images.

A note about lasso tool options: When extracting part of an image from its background, the result will be choppy and rough around the edges unless you adjust the feather value in the options bar. This fades the edges you create and can smooth the region into its new background.

Magic Wand Tool

The magic wand tool is similar to the magnetic polygon lasso tool except that rather than dragging to make a selection, you click in a region and a selection appears around similar colored pixels. You can control how similar pixels must be to be included in the selection by altering the tolerance value.

This tool is useful for selecting monochromatic regions or pieces of high-contrast images.

Open file & create a New file

Open a File/Create a New File

It is most likely that first time users of Photoshop will be starting with an image, say a photo that they need to alter or edit. In this case, you have two options:

First, you can open the image from the Photoshop file menu. It will be opened in the format it was saved in, so in order to work with it in photoshop, you'll need to save it as a .psd file (this will also ensure that you do not remove your original image should you need to revert to it). In essence it will become a .psd file as soon as you add an additional layer, and will save as such when you save it.

Another method for getting an image into photoshop is to copy and paste it into a new file in the application. This is especially useful for saving and altering webgraphics or screenshots.

Once the image is copied to the clipboard, go to Photoshop and select new from the file menu. A new file dialog will appear asking you to name the file, choose the size, resolution, colormode, and background. The image size (in pixels) will automatically reflect the size of the image copied to the clipboard. Choose CMYK if this graphic is to be used in print, or RGB for the web. For background, choose transparent (this can always be changed later).

Now that we have an open photoshop document, we can begin to use some of the basic photoshop tools. The next chapter of this tutorial will outline these various tools.