MAKING THE SPELL CHECKER OBEY YOUR COMMANDS

Photoshop's spell checker isn't just window dressing; it has a very robust spell-checking function, akin to Adobe InDesign's own spell checker, but if you understand how it works, you can save yourself some time and frustration. Basically, if you highlight some text on a layer, it checks just the highlighted text, so if you highlight one word, it just checks that one word (even if there are dozens of words in your paragraph). If you choose to spell check but don't have anything highlighted, it checks your entire document, regardless of how many Type layers you have. It's also helpful to know that it only checks real Type layers (layers that have a capital "T" as their thumbnail image in the Layers palette), and it cannot spell-check any layers with text that have been rasterized (converted from a Type layer into a regular image layer).