Photoshop has morphed into a surprisingly good tool for creating type used in images. The last few releases have added features that let you create paragraphs of text or simple lines of text used as headlines or labels. You can change the spacing between characters, warp your type, check your spelling, or even create selections in the shape of text. Drop shadows, beveled type, and other special effects are yours quickly and easily. And this release has given us the coveted capability of placing text on or inside a path. You may still want to use Adobe Illustrator or InDesign to create professional layouts where you can keep text and image files separate, or where you have to place buckets full of text at small point sizes. But if what you’re looking for is a greatlooking image that includes great-looking snippets of text, Photoshop can do the job.
Selecting a Type Mode
The text you create in Photoshop can be categorized in several different ways, but ultimately, you’re either adding just a little text (such as a word or single line of text) or a lot (maybe a paragraph or so). Accordingly, Photoshop separates type into two modes:
- Point type: Use this mode to create a headline or label. You can create point type by clicking in your image and typing; the line appears as you type and grows to whatever length you need (even if that length is wider or taller than your image). Point type never wraps around to a new line. To wrap to the next line, you must insert a hard return.
- Paragraph type: Use this mode to enter longer blocks of text on an image. It’s (unsurprisingly) similar to the kind of type you’re accustomed to working with in word processing programs. In Paragraph mode, all the text goes into a resizable bounding box, and if a line is too long, Photoshop automatically wraps it around to the next line. The Point type and Paragraph type modes each operate a bit differently, although they share many features and options.
Understanding Different Kinds of Type
Whether you’re using Point type mode or Paragraph type mode, you can choose several type options, each designed to help you work with, display, print, and edit text. These options determine how Photoshop expresses text in a file:
- Vector type: All text in Photoshop is initially created as vector type. Vector type provides scalable outlines that you can resize without producing jaggy edges in the diagonal strokes. You can also edit type in this mode, adding or subtracting characters or adjusting attributes, such as kerning and tracking. Vector type is always of optimum quality and appears crisp and clean.
- Rasterized type: When Photoshop converts vector type into pixels, it’s rasterized. When text is rasterized, it is no longer editable, but is, rather, a frozen graphic of what the text looks like. When you’ve finished editing vector type and want to merge the text with the other pixels in an image (or to perform some manipulations that can be done only with rasterized text), you can transform the vector type into pixels by rasterizing it. You can’t resize rasterized type without losing some quality or risking a bad case of the jaggies.
- Pixel fonts: Pixel fonts are tiny fonts designed for display at small sizes on computer screens. Unlike traditional fonts, which don’t fit into the natural pixel grid of your screen (and thus look rough at small sizes, particularly when they’re anti-aliased), pixel fonts are designed so every pixel corresponds to a pixel on your screen. These fonts, with names like MINI 7, MiniSerif, and Tenacity, are created in fixed sizes (say, 7 pixels high for MINI 7 or 10 pixels high for Tenacity and PixelDust). Diagonal lines are avoided as much as possible, with the font designs favoring horizontal and vertical strokes. As a result, pixel fonts look crisp and clear at small sizes without anti-aliasing. Indeed, you shouldn’t use anti-aliasing with pixel fonts, nor should you attempt to resize or rescale them. You can buy or download pixel fonts, install them on your computer, and use them just as you use other fonts, keeping in mind they look their best at their fixed size. Pixel fonts are often used in Web page design.
Photoshop treats pixel fonts as if they were vector type, creating them on their own type layer. However, pixel fonts look and behave more like bit-mapped raster fonts; you can’t resize them easily. You’ll find them easier to work with if you change your font measurement unit to pixels; choose Edit-->Preferences-->Units & Rulers (or Photoshop-->Preferences-->Units & Rulers in Mac OS X) and choose Pixels from the Type menu.
Selecting a Type Mode
The text you create in Photoshop can be categorized in several different ways, but ultimately, you’re either adding just a little text (such as a word or single line of text) or a lot (maybe a paragraph or so). Accordingly, Photoshop separates type into two modes:
- Point type: Use this mode to create a headline or label. You can create point type by clicking in your image and typing; the line appears as you type and grows to whatever length you need (even if that length is wider or taller than your image). Point type never wraps around to a new line. To wrap to the next line, you must insert a hard return.
- Paragraph type: Use this mode to enter longer blocks of text on an image. It’s (unsurprisingly) similar to the kind of type you’re accustomed to working with in word processing programs. In Paragraph mode, all the text goes into a resizable bounding box, and if a line is too long, Photoshop automatically wraps it around to the next line. The Point type and Paragraph type modes each operate a bit differently, although they share many features and options.
Understanding Different Kinds of Type
Whether you’re using Point type mode or Paragraph type mode, you can choose several type options, each designed to help you work with, display, print, and edit text. These options determine how Photoshop expresses text in a file:
- Vector type: All text in Photoshop is initially created as vector type. Vector type provides scalable outlines that you can resize without producing jaggy edges in the diagonal strokes. You can also edit type in this mode, adding or subtracting characters or adjusting attributes, such as kerning and tracking. Vector type is always of optimum quality and appears crisp and clean.
- Rasterized type: When Photoshop converts vector type into pixels, it’s rasterized. When text is rasterized, it is no longer editable, but is, rather, a frozen graphic of what the text looks like. When you’ve finished editing vector type and want to merge the text with the other pixels in an image (or to perform some manipulations that can be done only with rasterized text), you can transform the vector type into pixels by rasterizing it. You can’t resize rasterized type without losing some quality or risking a bad case of the jaggies.
- Pixel fonts: Pixel fonts are tiny fonts designed for display at small sizes on computer screens. Unlike traditional fonts, which don’t fit into the natural pixel grid of your screen (and thus look rough at small sizes, particularly when they’re anti-aliased), pixel fonts are designed so every pixel corresponds to a pixel on your screen. These fonts, with names like MINI 7, MiniSerif, and Tenacity, are created in fixed sizes (say, 7 pixels high for MINI 7 or 10 pixels high for Tenacity and PixelDust). Diagonal lines are avoided as much as possible, with the font designs favoring horizontal and vertical strokes. As a result, pixel fonts look crisp and clear at small sizes without anti-aliasing. Indeed, you shouldn’t use anti-aliasing with pixel fonts, nor should you attempt to resize or rescale them. You can buy or download pixel fonts, install them on your computer, and use them just as you use other fonts, keeping in mind they look their best at their fixed size. Pixel fonts are often used in Web page design.
Photoshop treats pixel fonts as if they were vector type, creating them on their own type layer. However, pixel fonts look and behave more like bit-mapped raster fonts; you can’t resize them easily. You’ll find them easier to work with if you change your font measurement unit to pixels; choose Edit-->Preferences-->Units & Rulers (or Photoshop-->Preferences-->Units & Rulers in Mac OS X) and choose Pixels from the Type menu.
Creating and Editing Type in Photoshop
![Creating and Editing Type in Photoshop]()
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