Sidebar Title goes Here
I couldn’t begin to convey in a single exercise, even a long
one, all the wonderful ways Photoshop permits you to edit
and format text. So here are a few truly terrific tips and tech-
niques to bear in mind when working on your own projects:
- Double-click a T thumbnail in the Layers panel to switch
to the type tool and select all the text in the correspond-
ing layer. - Armed with the type tool, you can double-click a word
to select it. Drag on the second click to select multiple
words. Triple-click to select an entire line; quadruple-
click to select a paragraph. - To increase the size of selected characters in 2-point in-
crements, press Ctrl+Shift+. To reduce the type size,
press Ctrl+Shift+. (That’s �-Shift- and �-Shift-
on the Mac.) - In the design world, line spacing is called leading. By
default, the leading in Photoshop is set to Auto, which
is 120 percent of the prevailing type size. To override this,
click the icon in the Character panel to highlight
the leading value (Auto), and then replace the value with
a number. In the figure below, I changed the leading to
16 points. Note that the new leading value affects the
distance between the selected text and the text above it.
A Dozen More Ways to Edit Text
- Click between two characters and press Alt+�
(Option-�) to move them together or Alt+� (Op-
tion-�) to move them apart. This is called pair kerning. - You can apply those same keystrokes to multiple charac-
ters at a time. For example, in the figure below, I selected
a line of type and pressed Alt+� to move the charac-
ters together; this wrapped another word onto that line.
Photoshop calls this tracking. In this example, the Adobe
every-line composer has shifted letters above the selected
area to space the text as expertly as possible. - When text is active, press Ctrl (or �) and drag inside the
text to move it. - Also when text is active, press Ctrl+T (�-T) to display
or hide the Character panel. Press Ctrl+M (�-M) to do
the same with the Paragraph panel. - The Color panel does not always reflect the color of high-
lighted text. But if you change the Color panel settings,
any highlighted text changes as well. - To change the formatting of multiple text layers at a
time, first select the layers. Then choose a typeface, style,
size, or other formatting settings. All selected text layers
change at once. - When editing text, you have one undo, which you can
exercise by pressing Ctrl+Z (or �-Z). If you need more
undos, press the Esc key to abandon all changes made
since you entered the type mode. But be careful when
using this technique. If you press the Esc key in the midst
of making a new text layer, you forfeit the whole thing.
Esc can’t be undone. Esc is forever. - After you enter a manual leading value (something other
than Auto) in the Character panel, you can increase or
decrease the leading using keyboard shortcuts. Press
Alt+� (or Option-�) to increase the leading; press Alt+�
(Option-�) to tighten it.
390 Lesson 11: Text and Shapes