The Photoshop Tip of the Week for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

Back in September of last year, I sent out a tip about Photoshop 5’s type tool. Well, now that Photoshop 6.0 has been out for a while, I think it’s time to revisit that area. If you’re still using 5 or 5.5, don’t worry; I’ll continue coving those versions in future tips.

In 6.0 you have two ways to create a block of text. If you click and release the mouse button, you’ll get what’s known as point text. That’s where you get a single line of text and you have to press Return to create a second line. This feature is most useful for creating headlines and other text that should remain a single line. If, on the other hand, you click and drag when creating a text block, then you’ll be creating a column (also known as paragraph text) to contain your text. That way Photoshop will automatically wrap the text onto multiple lines as you enter more text.

You can convert point text to paragraph text or vice versa by choosing Layer>Type>Convert to Paragraph Text.

When you’re entering or editing text, you can hold the Command key (Mac), or Ctrl key (Win) to reposition your text. Just hold that key and then drag the text around your screen.

When you’re done entering or editing your text, do one of the following: press Enter, choose a different tool in the tool palette, click on a different layer, or click the checkbox that appears in the Options bar. That will let Photoshop know that you’re done working on the text and that you’d like all of Photoshop’s other features to be available.

If you need to edit the text after entering it, just click within the text with the type tool. Or, you can double-click on the “T” that shows up on that layer in the Layers Palette to automatically switch to the type tool and select all the text.

When you click and drag across a range of text to select it, Photoshop will revere the colors in that area. You can type Command-H (Mac), or Ctrl-H (Win) to hide this selection without deselecting the text. Type that shortcut again to make the selection visible again.

When editing your text, click on font field in the Options bar and then start to enter the name of the typeface you’d like to use. As you do that, Photoshop will find the first font that starts with the letter you entered. When you type “H”, it might bring up a font called “happy days”, then you type an “e” and it find “Helvetica”, etc.

You can also click once on the fonts field and then use the up and down arrow keys to cycle through all the fonts you have installed. This is one of my favorite features in 6.0 and I use it on a daily basis.

To change the color of text after you’ve entered it (you don’t have to be in the type tool, you just need to have that layer active), type Option-Delete (Mac), or Alt-Backspace (Win). That should fill all the text on that layer with your current foreground color.

If you click on the Palettes button in the Options bar (the text tool must be active to find that choice), then two palettes will appear with settings related to your text (or when editing your text type Command-T on the Mac, or Ctrl-T in Windows to open those palettes). I prefer to stack these to palettes one on top of another. To accomplish that, drag the name of one palette to the bottom edge of the other palette and then release the mouse button. Be sure to pay attention to where your cursor is, it has to end up being right at the bottom edge of the second palette to get this to work.

Finally, if you’d like to make a photo show up inside the shape of your text, place the text on a layer directly above the text (and make sure the photo layer is active) and then choose Layer>Group with Previous.

Ok, I think that’s enough about text for one tip of the week. I’m sure we’ll revisit the text tool in future installments.

Have a great week!

-Ben Willmore