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

We have all been deeply affected by the tragic events of September 11th. To the families who mourn the loss of loved ones, our thoughts and prayers are with you. It seems a bit strange to go about the daily business of working with Photoshop and doing things like creating this weekly tip, but now, more than ever, it's important to keep looking ahead and continue to find ways to get better at what we do. So, in that spirit, let's take a look at Photoshop's Type tool. It's been a while since we've paid a visit to this tool, so let's see what else we can squeeze out of this magnificent feature. Most of the tips we'll cover this week will be Photoshop 6.0 specific.

When creating a text block, you can click and drag with the Type tool to specify a column width, or you can Option-click (Mac), or Alt-click (Win) to specify a specific size for the column.

When working with most type related settings (size, leading, etc.), you can click once on the setting and then use the up and down arrow keys to change the setting. Holding Shift will usually change the setting in a larger increment.

If you'd like to change both the size and leading settings at the same time, then hold down the Shift and Command keys (Mac), or Shift and Ctrl keys (Win) and drag the corner point of the column you are working on. That will scale the column and text at the same time.

When I typeset a price like $20.00, I'll usually select the dollar sign and the pennies and then choose Superscript from the side menu of the Characters palette. That will scale down those characters and push them up so they line up with the top of the rest of the text. The only problem with doing that is that the dollar sign will often look too thin compared to the rest of the text. To fix that, select the dollar sign and choose Faux bold from the side menu of the Characters palette. You have to be careful when you use Faux Bold because the Layer>Type>Warp Type feature will be disabled for any text boxes that use that style.

If you find that your text is a bit too thick, then you can thin it out by switching to the Move tool, then choosing Layer>Layer Style>Stroke. You'll want to set the Position setting to Inside and lower the opacity setting all the way to 0%. Now, experiment with the size setting until the text looks the way you desire.

If you use the quote key on your keyboard, Photoshop will use straight quotes instead of curly ones. Straight quotes are not really quote marks at all, instead they are inch and foot marks. To create curly ones on a Mac, type Option-[ for an opening quote and add Shift to that combo to get a closing quote. Substitute the right bracket key (]) when you need a single quote mark instead of a double one. On Windows, it's a bit different. For a single opening quote, type Alt-0145, and for the closing version type Alt-0146. For double quotes, type Alt-0147 and Alt-0148. When you do this, make sure you use the numeric keypad and have NumLock turned on.

When you start a paragraph with quote marks, it looks best of the quote mark 'hangs' outside the column width. You can choose Roman Hanging Punctuation from the side menu of the Paragraphs palette, but that will only affect the straight quotes and not the curly ones. To force a quote mark out into the margins of your text, click right before the quote and then use a negative kerning setting to push it outside the column that contains your text.

You can use the same technique with bulleted type (type Option-8 to create a bullet on the Mac and Alt-8 on some Windows machines). Start by typing in your bulleted list, then click to the left of the first bullet and use negative kerning to push it outside of the column and into the margins. Continue doing that until the text that comes right after the bullet lines up with the second line of the bulleted copy. Finally, use the left indent setting in the Paragraphs palette to push all that text to the right until the bullet lines up with any non-bulleted text, effectively creating bulleted text where the second line of text lines up with the text after the bullet.

That's all for this week. If you want more Photoshop goodies, then be sure to check out my new Photoshop Questions of the Week at www.digitalmastery.com/questions and send your questions to questions@digitalmastery.com.

-Ben Willmore