From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Design

Working with paragraph (area) type - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Design

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Working with paragraph (area) type

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- [Instructor] In addition to being able to create point or headline type, which we covered in the Photoshop Essential Training Basic course, Photoshop can create area type. Now to make it easier, I've created a note in the upper left corner. So if we click and hold on the eyedropper tool, we can select the note tool, and then click in the upper left of the note. If we select the icon here in the options panel, that will show the notes panel. And then when we click on it, it should select all of the text. If it doesn't, just click and drag in order to select it, and use the keyboard shortcut Cmd + C on Mac, or Ctrl + C on Windows to copy that to the clipboard. Then I'll select the type tool. I want the horizontal type tool. And before we add our text, I'll right-click on the type tool and choose to reset the tool. Then I'll click and drag in the image area to create a bounding box for our area type. Photoshop will automatically fill that with placeholder text, but we can use Cmd + V on Mac or Ctrl + V on Windows in order to paste the text that we have copied to the clipboard. Now if I want to resize the box, I can select any of the anchor points in order to make it larger or smaller. In this case, I'll make it fit right within that white rectangle. If I want to reposition the entire text block, I can hold down the Cmd key and then click and drag it. For now, I'll just position it right here. In order to commit to the type, I'll click on the check mark in the options bar. Now on the properties panel, with the type layer still targeted, I'm going to change the text size down from 12 to nine points. And I'll also change the alignment and justification under the paragraph area to this first option here. Underneath that, we can also add first line indents, as well as spacing between paragraph options. I'm also going to enable the hyphenate option. And then to access even more advanced options, we can display the paragraph panel. It's located under the window menu or underneath the type menu, and I have it showing here, so I'll expand it. If we use the flyout option, I can choose Roman hanging punctuation. That's going to allow some of the characters to be slightly outside of the bounding box. But visually, they're going to look a lot more balanced. Then I'll select the flyout menu again to choose justification. And at 100%, there's no additional spacing added between the word, letter, or glyph spacing. But we can go in and change that. I'm going to set the glyph scaling to 98 to 102, so that the characters can actually change in order to make the text look better while it's justified. Then I'll return to the flyout menu again and choose hyphenation. So here, we have more controls for things like determining the maximum number of consecutive lines in which hyphenations can occur. If you have a word that does hyphenate like a proper name or maybe a word that can be misread when it's hyphenated, you can select the word and then under the character panel, you can use the flyout menu and choose no break. If you are working with multiple paragraphs, you might want to change from the single line composer to the every line composer. This can help make the body of text look more solid and help avoid what are known as rivers and blocks of text where there are awkward breaks of text including widows and orphans. So that you don't just have one or two words in the last line of a paragraph or the beginning of a column or a page. In addition, there's an option for the world ready layout. And once enabled, you can then access the Middle Eastern features, if you have a document that contains more than one language in it. All right, I just want to triple-click on the first line of type here. Then I'm going to change the character to bold and center align it. I'll tap the check in order to commit to that. And well, it's looking a little bit jagged, that's just because of the zoom percentage that I'm viewing. If I use Cmd + Plus in order to zoom in, then we no longer see those jaggies. And one shortcut before we wrap up. If you are copying and pasting text within Photoshop or from Illustrator, you can copy the text, and then you can always choose to paste as plain text or with the formatting. So there you have it, a quick introduction to paragraph or area type in Photoshop.

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