Type in Photoshop

Photoshop s type functions give you the ability to generate fully editable type directly on the image. You have the ability to enter text in a bounding box to confine your text to a predefined area and to attribute paragraph characteristics such as indents and spaces to it. There is a Warp text feature that bends type into a variety of defined shapes , and Photoshop CS introduces a new feature that enables you to enter type on a curved path .

Many of the basic type functions ”including orientation, font, style, size , anti-aliasing, alignment, and color ”are accessed on the Options bar when the Type tool is selected. Additional type-specific characteristics ”such as leading, tracking, horizontal and vertical scale, and baseline shift ”are easily accessed from the Character and Paragraph palettes. You can set type attributes before you enter text, or edit selected characters after you enter them. In addition, you have a complete set of tools to create and edit Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters .

Photoshop has a spell checker that ensures accurate spelling without having to thumb through your paper copy of Webster s each time you re unsure of a word. There is also a Find And Replace command that enables you to search for and change words or characters.

Don t be so dazzled by Photoshop s sophisticated type features that you use it for page layout. You ll find it much easier to import your image into a page-layout program (such as Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress) and generate the body copy there. For one thing, the file size of your page-layout documents will be much smaller than equivalent documents in Photoshop. For another, Photoshop s performance in managing large amounts of text is pretty clunky , even on the fastest computers. It s best to concentrate Photoshop s type features where they ll do the most good: on spot text, headlines, and other display copy ”any text where graphic enhancements are needed.