Lessons

Lesson Info

Typography and Creative Borders

when we're working with type in photo shop there's a few shortcuts that I think you're very important to know because type can look make our break on image if you're adding text to it and there are a few functions that you I think we need to address because of the nature of most typefaces I will warn you in advance once you learn these techniques you will never look a type the same way and don't blame me if you get into a car accident because you're driving that street looking at a sign on the building going that current ing is horrible because that's what happens so here's what the way you could do what the good news is the keyboard shortcut is exactly the same in each case is just where you click or how you click first that makes a difference so in every case I presti for my type tool so I used to live in ottawa canada and this was always a problem because every type face there is if you type a word like ottawa in cop capital letters there's always too much space between the a in the...

w and the a that's just the way the typeface works and people used to live with it but then someone said well you know in the typography world we would fix it manually now we can do it wash and say now this is a function around for a long time but it's important that I think we know about this you just do a single click in between the pair of letters and option or all left arrow yeah and this is called turning is taking the space between two letters and making it closer together so in any case is works out we have a capital t with a lower case o you want the oda kind of sneaking underneath the t a little bit and most typefaces do not do that automatically so that's why it's important to know about these by the same token you may have occasions where you type two letters and they're almost touching each other and the currents a little too tight that's very a lot less likely to happen it's more likely this but this idea of being able to go in and just tighten things up on a layer or excuse me turning pair by current impair makes a big difference so that's the first thing the second thing we can do is to say he was the same keyboard shortcut but in a different way this case I've selected the whole word is that have just a pair tracking means the space we all letters so as I pressed optional than the right arrow I'm spreading out the letters evenly too the more spread out and this is a very nice graphic effect if you're tryingto line up your type so everything is the same whip we don't want to guess really change the thought size do that it has changed the tracking both of these things can be also done numerically in a dialog box I know very few people look at something say I think I need to current minus forty two most people go now about there and tracking is the same then you can type in track two hundred or two fifty or three ten but most will look and say about that much if you have text that's in a text block where it just is automatically rapping to the next line or you've used a carriage turn to go the next line the other option we have is letting which is the space in between lines of type and it's the same keyboard short again option or all in this case the upper down arrow keys so I want things closer together I press the up arrow key if I want him further apart I press the down arrow key and the on ly warning label that comes with this is if you have been doing some work in photoshopped with type and you have a large font size on you make large leading to go with that large font size don't be surprised if in the next time use the type tool you put in a much smaller smaller font size but it still has the leading this much because that's it has a very weird memory in that respect so one of things that we can do to avoid that is once you've done all your specialty tracking encouraging this kind of reset the character panel back to square one now as a way to do that in one second but as an interesting aside as if you're ever at a you know those photoshopped cocktail parties to go to where we trade stories and ask trivia questions I'm sure you although those right those photoshopped cocktail parties if you ever want to I tried to stump your photo shop user friends with a trivia question and the question is there is a keyboard shortcut the same shortcut does two different things depending on the circumstances and the answer that question is commander control t so how it works is if I have for example the ottawa layers my active layer but I have not used the type tool in any way commander control t gives me regular free transform so I could adjust the type this way let's escape out of there if I select the type and press commander control t it brings up the character dialogue box so it's the same keyboard shark up it has to very distinctly different things depending on whether you have text active or not so if you're ever thinking I just want to make sure everything's back to normal here commander control t will pop up the character panel on one of the options and here is to reset says reset character but that means reset settings for this panel just don't do it with type selected because then I will reset the current type I don't want to do in this case because it actually change this one but if I had no texts elected then I could go in and reset the character and everything just kind of goes back to normal seat still happen even though I had I'd have to make sure type player isn't even active then I should be able to do it so when you're working with type those are the ways we can do it now just in case you're not aware of most people are but in case you hadn't made a text block before if you click once it makes a single line of text like this if you click and drag it will make a text blocked which you khun resize and the text will re flow automatically yesterday it very beginning also showed it is possible if you make a path out of any shape whatever it might be if I used the elliptical tool and make a path then if I take my type tool it will automatically assume now bye looking the middle I want type inside that path there is also an option of what type along a path it's a little clunky in my opinion that used to be great and then they fixed it or improved it and now it's just really not fun but it still works if you really needed to is just not as easy okay I want to just sort of touch on something just to give you some ideas here one of things I like to do a lot is when I have the photograph I really like for some reason just having a photo that has a generic rectangular edge to it doesn't interest me as much as creating something that's a little more unusual has a bit of an edge to it or a border or something like that so I'm gonna just give you a couple of ideas of some of the ways we could start to do that I'm gonna add a new layer below command control click on it to add a layer below and let's temporarily hide this for a second and all they want to do it first is create a shape that's close to the full size and is filled with any color I'm using blacks that happened to be my color the color has nothing to do with it just as long as you can see it now in the history of photo shop interesting thing happened because not many years ago now how many in two thousand six ish I wrote a book called photoshopped finishing touches which is all about borders and edges and one of things you used to be able to do and I know it because I wrote many techniques in this book that let you do this you could take on a shape like this on a transparent layer and you could go to a filter like brushstrokes and when you hit spatter the edge of this wood spatter and when you had sprayed stroke the edge of it would sprayed stroke and right around cs three or four adobe broke this and when I pointed out to them their response was oh you stable to do that on I was like yeah used teo but now you can't which is really unfortunate and if you try to make it a smart object it still doesn't work so well that's I remember thinking gosh darn it that is rather unfortunate probably exactly what I said when I learned that because I was disappointed so there has to be a solution for it so there is and this is I'm showing this because it's not an obvious trick but once you see it hopefully we'll open up other possibilities for you so the trick is this I want to ultimately end up with an interesting edge to this rectangle have to do it in a slightly different way so I make a smaller selection yet again and press q for quick mask quick mask is this red or colored mind happens be red but a colored overlay that represents your selection almost as if it's a mask and here's the weird part but it's just reality although you cannot apply a filter to layer that has transparency nothing will happen you can apply a filter too quick mask so what I do instead of what I tried to before as I do that filter gallery and go to brush strokes for example you can see now look at that because I'm applying it to the mask I khun do the filter how weird is that so I have to go through and I can add more than once I want to spray stroke and a spatter or whatever I want click okay and that applies it to here then I have to get out a quick mask and apply a mask to this layer then I can clip it together and get a nice edge to my documents so it's a bit of a workaround but once you know that's available then they said oh well now I can do this and this because you know now that's an option so it's an oddity that unfortunately still hasn't been addressed I keep pointing it out to them and they're like maybe no one except me ever wants to apply a filter too transparent layer which I find hard to believe but still doesn't work so at least there is a way around that part of the reason I show this for two reasons I think it's interesting effect but also it shows that if you ever run into a roadblock were like she I can't get that tow work there's usually some way to get around sometimes that's a little bit odd like this but at least there is an option so that's first thing I would try something like that the other thing that's kind of interesting to do is to try and create an edge based on other images that you have and it's ideally it's one that has lots of detail and it could be texture or even if it's something like I've used where I've been going for a walk and I've seen a very busy brush with all sorts of branches and leaves him like that might work it's not something I would use as a normal photograph but like this I took it because I saw there's a bunch of different texture in here so I might be able to use so I opened this and because I want to put this on a mask I really want to get it down to black and white so as we saw earlier the threshold adjustment layer takes us image and turns it in to just simply black or white depending on where I move it either more white arm or black so the way I have to look at this is if I'm gonna copy and pay some of these pixels onto my layer mask out the kind of conceptualizing my head what will that look like as a border for my mask so I'm just gonna pick an area in here somewhere that has a combination of different interesting little black and white shades to it and each one of these has a somewhat little trick to make this work so in this case the trick is if I just chose copy nothing what happened because I'm on the adjustment layer I need to copy the in effect as if I've emerged the adjustment layer and the photograph can I do that using command it's called that copy merged that's saying go is if you merge the layers and copy it without merging cause I want to keep using this so once I've done that now I can come back over here to this document optional click on the mask and she was paste and now aiken put this whoever I want and free transform it in any way that I want including squishing it or whatever once we've done that then you can see now I've added another little element to this where it's got interesting borders probably not quite as interesting as I imagine in my head but it's close so I could continue work on that and free transforming maybe it needs to speak more like this I don't know yet I need to say I wouldn't do it only on one side and do it on all four using different elements I don't want each one of those two look exactly the same so I would go back to this document and then go back to threshold say well now let's push it this way a bit over here and then try making maybe a selection from this piece if I need one for the top or bottom I go this way to get the idea but that's just really my only goal here is to open up the thought process say how can I do something a little different than just using a paintbrush or something else is using these threshold based element's copping a pacing and again the trick is special adjustment layer moved the slider to where you want make a selection and then copy merged and then go to your layer mask and option click on it are all click and then paste so lots of different options there yesterday at some point along the way I think was the very beginning I talked about working with paths and how we can paint along a path this would be another opportunity use that make a path it's a rectangle use a brush and do that stroke the brush with a path and use that as an element either as a border or an edge effect on a mask so a lot of these things apart the reason I liketo talk about different techniques is that once you see what it can do you can use it in different ways for different things like that paint along a path was special effect to put a glowing thing around the dancer it was a way to use the spot healing brush along a path or this way to make interesting brush effects to make an edge so all of those things are available so just to show you what that would look like I would come over here just to make life a little easier temporarily hide these things that take my rectangle tool set to path make a path then take my paintbrush and this is where the experimental park is you'd have to come in and try and find which brush is going to give you the best effect either one that you created or something else and this is going to be very strange but we'll do it anyway what the heck so let's go paths stroke along the path with the brush tool similar pressure okay my spacing was way too high so that's uh that uh k spacing way go and I also had the opacity said really low so it would just make sure I had it the right way so now oh yeah perfect okay we get the idea I would have spent more time finding just the right brush but obviously didn't in this case but then I'd go back to layers and now I could put those together and make just the most beautiful mask thing you've ever seen in your life okay not it's not so much but anyway you get the idea