Photoshop® CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Giving Your Images a Text Message

In This Chapter

• Testing your type techniques

• Creating paragraphs with type containers

• Shaping up with Warp Text and type on a path

Un croquis vaut mieux qu'un long discours. Or, as folks often paraphrase Napoleon, "A picture is worth a thousand words." But sometimes in your Photoshop artwork, nothing says Bob's Hardware quite like the very words Bob's Hardware. A picture of a hammer and a picture of a nail — perhaps toss in some nuts and bolts — all are great symbols for your client's logo. However, you also need to give Bob's customers a name and an address so they can actually spend some money, which goes a long way toward helping Bob pay you.

For a program that's designed to work with photographic images, Photoshop has incredibly powerful text capabilities. Although it's not a page-layout program such as Adobe InDesign or a word-processing program such as Microsoft Word, Photoshop can certainly enable you to add lines or even paragraphs of text to your images.

Photoshop offers you three categories of text:

• Point type is one or more lines of text, comparable with the headlines in a newspaper or the text that you add to, say, a Bob's Hardware advertisement. Click with a type tool to add point type.

• Paragraph type consists of multiple lines of text. Like in a word-processing program, a new line is started whenever your typing reaches the margin. ...