Lessons

Lesson Info

Text Basics

Let's go ahead and just make a new document. We're gonna go to file, we're gonna go to new, and let's create a document that is 2,000 by 2,000. 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels, and we'll do 300 pixels per inch. So let's first start working with text. If I were to press T, T is the tool for text. There's a couple things I can do when I have this selected. I can either just click and start typing and that will be a free-form text block, or if I click and drag something like right like this, that is going to ensure that all the text maintains and stays within the bounds of this text block. So if you're building an elaborate presentation, and you know that this piece of text needs to fit within these bounds, then you go ahead and you make a text-bound block like that. And I'm gonna just start typing here. (keyboard clicks) If you look at this, it's showing up in like a light blue color. The reason why it's showing up in light blue is because the text color that I have selected up here is blue...

. This is just like any text editing program that you would use. Even something like a document that you're working on, any type of text document you're working on in any program. You can highlight it, and once we highlight it, this becomes a thing you that fill it with. So once I click that color picker, I can change this to any color that I want. Maybe change it to red or black, whatever color that I want to fill this with. I'll fill it with red, that's okay. So with this, in this text block, it's set to 30 point font. I can change this font to 55 point font if I wanted to. Oops. (mouse clicks) Change that 55 point font, I can change it to whatever size I want using this font here. What I was telling you about when we talk about true type font and open type font is if you look over here on the left-hand side, we see that the font that I'm using is bebas neue. I don't know, neue, neue? However you just wanna pronounce that, it's probably, I don't know, anything other than American maybe. (laughs) So if I click on that font, I got that font selected and I make that, I can make it light, I can make it thin, I can make it book, I can make it regular, and I can make it bold. Those are all open type settings so that at any time, I can change the look and the feel of that type set by using that open type font. But there are other fonts, that aren't necessarily open type. Let's see if we have another one here that's not open type. Yeah, here, we have bold and we have regular. That's the only thing that this one has, it only has two settings. So some of those open type fonts might not have all of those settings. So if you have an open type font that has a lot of settings, don't expect that every font that you're ever gonna get is gonna have all of those settings as well. So let me go ahead and change this to what other font. Maybe ariel, I don't think ariel has anything. Oh, yep, it does, ariel has a bunch of them too. What you can do with this, if you click on one of these and you highlight it, you can press the down arrow key, and that will allow you to flip through these without having to drop through the down or through the drop-down box. Press down, press up, that flips through all of your text on the fly. The same is true over here with this type font. This was the open type face that we're using, this is the font that we're using, if we wanna change that font without using the drop down, I can just click the arrow down. This is brilliant because as you're building your, whatever it is that you're trying to create, if it's a brochure, whatever, and you wanna see different type fonts, just press down until you find a font that you really like, and you're like, "Oh yeah, I like that one. "I'm gonna stick with that one." Like, you know, this one might be a good one for, maybe a good one for some type of, what do you call it, watermark or something. I tend to like this font a lot, this bebas font. This is one of my favorite fonts, I use it all the time. I use it in my blog, it's all over the place. Almost all the power points and presentations that you've seen so far in this presentation have been a mixture of the corbel font and the bebas font. So if we didn't want this to be a block like this, so if we were to just keep typing here, just keep going, you see how we keep typing it maintains the constraints of that block that we have set up. The bounds of this area that we can type in are set by the block that we have created. Now, that's not always gonna be true. If we go ahead and we delete this, and we make a new type here, and I just start typing, this one doesn't have any bounding block box around it. This is free-form, and I can move it around just like I can move around any other layer. I can press V for the move tool, and I can move this all around my canvas with no problem. One thing that's really cool here though, is that, you know, if I don't get the type exactly right as far as the size that I want. So if I'm building a composition, I wanna put Blake Rudis there and maybe photography underneath, and I want photography to be the same size as the Blake Rudis. It can very difficult to get the point to be exactly correct, so if I press command or control T, I said we were gonna use this hot key a lot. Press shift and alt, I make this larger. (keyboard clicking) Look at the type here. We started out at 55 point, didn't we? Now, we're at a 112.1 point. So if I were to change this to to make that a little bit larger as well, I can either type it in, or I can press command or control T to make that larger or smaller. Another thing about working with text and with fonts here. Let me go ahead and make this a little bit bolder. I'm gonna make this the bebas bold, okay. (keyboard clicking) I'm gonna get sick of my name by the time we're done with this. (laughs) So if I wanted to make photography underneath this and make this a big bold Blake Rudis Photography, what I would do here, I would press command or control J. I'd duplicate that layer, press V for the move tool, and move it underneath. You might think, "Well, why wouldn't you just press enter "and go underneath and keep typing underneath?" Well, here, because these are free form, I can place them anywhere I want. So a lot of times when I'm working with text, and this is a really good thing to remember, is to, anytime you're making a new line, make a new line on its own layer, that way you can move it to where you need to move it, instead of trying to stay within the confines of what happens when you press enter. Now, there are options to change the spacing here, and I will show you that as well. But one thing that we really wanna work with when we're working with shapes, text, and anything when it comes to professional things like this, the last thing you want is a piece of font that goes even a centimeter past the other one. You know, if you wanna keep things right in line, it can be difficult to do that, but if we press command or control R to get our rulers as we've seen before, I can start making some grids and some guides around here. So if I grab the ruler over here, and I go right to the edge of this font right there and then press space bar and move over here and go right to the edge of this font right here, that is telling me that this Blake Rudis that we have down here has the bor, I'm basically making an imaginary border for that. So if I click on this top one here, and I wanna call this photography, I'm gonna press T for the type tool and just highlight this. Type photography. (keyboard clicks) If I press control A, that will select everything in there. Just like you would see on any other text document, press command or control A and it will select the whole area there. So I don't want this to be bold, let's change this to something like light, okay. Now, what I was saying before, if you want things to be even, we definitely want things to be even, so if I wanted this to be even, I would press command or control T and press and hold shift, drag this in from the bottom and line that up perfectly with that side to make sure that this type is resting right on that line. So now if we press, look at this one here, it's a little bit off, now it's perfect, okay. (mouse clicks) If we were to commit to that by pressing enter, by pressing command or control H, they're both perfectly spaced like they should be, but if I were to click on here, this is at 83.69 point font and this is at 91.41 font. So we can change and alter the size by pressing command or control T to get things perfectly within the bounds that we want. Rulers are your best friend here, rulers and guides. If we press command or control H, and we press V for the move tool and then move this over here. If we look at these, this type, and we press the V key and we move this around, you see how it's starting to attach these with magnets? It's got these little purple magnets that show up. Those are your guides that are helping you work with text. This is relatively new for Photoshop CC. It's absolutely brilliant, we didn't have this before. So we had to do before is we had to go in, and we had to make our own imaginary guides for the middle of the image. And it was just, it was a nightmare. So if we click on photography here, we can get this lined up to make that also magnetized to that center. And that looks pretty good right there. Now, also with these, if we were to go ahead and click on both of these layers, you'll see we have a couple different settings up here. These settings up here will align the layers. So if I click on this, it's going to align them horizontally and automatically match them up. And that's with the move tool, and it's only in the move tool. In the move tool, these are where your auto-alignment is going to be. If we were to do this, it's gonna align them to the right. If we do this, it aligns them to the left. If we do this, it aligns them right dead center. These ones over here, if we were to do that, it's gonna place them right on top of each other, which we don't necessarily want to do. Press that, it's gonna align them from the top, and this will align it from the bottom of whatever the base layer is that's selected. So we'll just go ahead and keep it like, uh, did we need to go back a little bit? Let's go back to here, just go back in our history. (laughs) So that will help you align those layers and make sure that they're even and center on the image. Now, there is a couple other of different things that we can do with fonts that are outside of the menu that we see at the top, and that's gonna be the actual font menu that we have to, no, the paragraph menu that we have to do things here. So I'm gonna go Blake Rudis, and then photography. (keyboard clicking) And if I highlight these, up here we have the same tools that we'd have in other programs, if I just center these. Now, they'll both be centered. They're gonna be off a little bit, that's okay. We'll just move them over here. The V for the move tool, move them. If I highlight both of these like this, and then I go up to window, and I go up to paragraph and paragraph styles. (keyboard clicks) It's paragraph that I want, window, go to paragraph, okay. And I go to character, this will tell you where the alignment is. It gives you all the specs of what's happening right now with your text and with your font. So if you see this, it's set to auto. With that set to auto, that's the alignment of the top from the bottom. If I change this from nine point, we had a 56 point font selected. So by default, this is gonna default to a 56 point font spacing, to make that spacing perfect, but sometimes, that's a little bit off. So we can also press alt and the down key. If I press alt and down, notice how it's changing that point. So I can go right underneath there, perfectly underneath there, and boom. So that's a way to alter text without making two different lines. The only thing that you need to remember is that that is gonna be a different point setting so sometimes it's better to separate those things. Instead of having them on the same line, instead of having them in the same text block, you put them in different text blocks to pull them apart, and you edit them individually. Now, there are some, there are some text that has different rules within them that are actually pretty interesting. So let's go ahead and try another one. There's all kinds of different fonts in here that we can do this with. Let's see which one, I think it was this one. We'll try this. (keyboard clicking) There will be different settings down here that you can use for this. So if we do this, it's gonna, it's gonna make everything bolder and bigger. It's like a faux bold, this is gonna give us an italic look. This will make everything capital, isn't that cool? Cause there's sometimes where I'm workin' on things, and I'm like, "I just wish everything can be capital "with a push of a button," and we can't necessarily do that in some other programs, but here in Photoshop, we can. This will make everything bigger. Sometimes I want the first letters to be a little bit bigger. So what you see what it did here, it made everything bigger, it made it all capital, but with this one, it made it all capital and it added the first two letters bigger than the other two letters. That's already cool too. So if you're working on a document and sometimes, like the beginning, you see this a lot of times in story books, where the beginning of a paragraph has a big letter and then the rest of it just kind of continues on, this can be a way to get that look really quickly and really easily without having to go in and change the point of the B, or the point of the R, independently from the rest of the text. Here, we have the one and two, the sub, the sans script, that you can put on here. So if I had a one right here, if I were to go into the paragraph of this, right here, and then go into the characters, put that one up, put that one down. You can also do fractions and all kinds of other cool stuff there. There is even other fonts that will have other characteristics built into that font that you might not have access to with all the fonts. Some of them have the ability to give you a slightly different look on the font that you're working with. I believe one of them that I have here is... (keyboard typing) This one, here, I believe it's this one. (keyboard clicking) If we were to change this to, just get rid of these, get rid of that, and we are looking right down here. You see that they have different ways of operating the text. (keyboard clicking) See that? It added a little more stroke to the bottom. It's almost like a calligraphy that's going onto the bottom of some of those letters. Turn that off, now it's gone. But these are things that you wouldn't know existed until you went into the actual paragraph style of this to change the paragraph styles of that text. And not every font is gonna have this, as we saw before, some of those fonts didn't have these. There are some fonts do and some fonts that don't. And some of the fonts that I'm using now, you might not have the Braveheart font because you don't think that movie is as amazing as I do, and I've watched it 65 times to count. (laughs) But, I'm not joking. (mumbles) I find fonts all over the place. I'm apart of a design website that, every once in awhile, has a package of 42 fonts for, I don't know, ten or 12 dollars, so I'll buy those 42 fonts and just keep stackin' 'em in, stackin' 'em in, stackin' 'em in. Fonts are something that, in types that I should say, not necessarily fonts, but good types, that is something that can be very addicting when you find a really good one that you like. I love that bebas, and I love it, and I probably will for a long time. When you find one that you really like, it can be really addicting to go back to it. So really, just go through here, navigate through here and see what, how these alter the text that you're working with. And don't be afraid that you're gonna break anything or destroy anything cause that's not gonna happen. As soon as you leave that type set layer and start another one, it won't be there. It won't remember that.