Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Special Text Effects

You can spice up Photoshop text in a variety of ways by adding fades, strokes, drop shadows, textures, and more. You can even take a photo and place it inside text. The great thing is that you can perform all these tricks without rasterizing the text, so it remains fully and gloriously editable. Read on to learn all kinds of neat ways to add a little something special to your text.

Tip

Perhaps the easiest special effect of all is creating partially opaque or ghosted text. All you have to do is lower the type layer’s opacity in the Layers panel, as explained on Tweaking a Layer’s Opacity and Fill. That’s it!

Faded Text

It’s easy to make text look like it fades into an image, as shown in Figure 14-26. This technique is useful when you’re creating a photo-centric advertisement or postcard, or want to showcase a collection of photos on your website. Here’s what you do:

1. Open a photo and add some text.

   Press T to grab the Type tool and type a single word. Be sure to use a thick font such as Helvetica Bold or Black, Arial Black (used here), or Impact.

   POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Photoshop’s Composition Methods

   Displaying text is a complicated matter. To determine how it displays paragraph text, Photoshop takes into consideration word spacing, letter spacing, glyph spacing, and hyphenation. With that information, it uses a complex formula to determine how to space lines of text (and break them, if necessary) in order to fit them within the text box you created. This process is called ...