Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Formatting Text

Now that you’ve learned all about the different kinds of Photoshop text, it’s time to dig in to how to format it. Photoshop lets you control text to within an inch of its life. Beyond the basics of font, size, and color, you can adjust the softness of the letters’ edges, the space between each letter, the space between lines of text, and so on.

The most commonly used settings live in the Options bar, while the more advanced typographic goodies are nestled inside the Type menu, as well as the Character and Paragraph panels. No matter where the settings live, if they control text, you’ll learn about them in the following pages. Read on!

Tip

If you’re designing a website in Photoshop, you can make Photoshop copy all the text’s formatting, as well as its position on the page, for use in the program you’ll use for actually building the site (say, Adobe Dreamweaver). Once you’ve got the text formatted just right, Control-click (right-click) near a Type layer’s name in the Layers panel, and then choose Copy CSS (short for “cascading style sheets”). Photoshop grabs all the pertinent info, which you can then paste into another program. Sweet!

Formatting with the Options Bar

When you have the Type tool active, the Options bar (Figure 15-13) offers basic text-tweakers such as font family, style, size, anti-aliasing (see Formatting with the Options Bar), alignment, and color. (The Character panel, discussed on The Character Panel, offers all these settings and more.)

Note

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