The Type Tool

Horizontal type tool:

On the face of it the type tool would seem to be a plug and play tool. Just click the big T icon and start typing. This of course will work, but it is worth understanding the basic and advanced options available to you so you can have maximum control over your typography.

Basic options:

From left to right here are the basic options available to you.

Change the text orientation

This changes the text from horizontal to vertical.

Font family

This is a drop down menu of all the fonts currently active on your system. I recommend using some Font Management Software to keep things manageable. I use FontExplorer X.

Font style

This is whether you choose the regular, bold or italic version of your font face. Whether these options are available depends on whether you have all font styles of a particular font.

Font size

This defines the font size. A useful trick is that you can hover over the TT icon and drag left and right. Alternatively you can use the dropdown or type the number you want directly into the box.

Anti aliasing

This defines how you want your text to be anti-aliased. There are five options. See the image below for the effects this creates.

Left, right and centre align text

These align the text according to the text box you have drawn.

Warping text:

Just to the right of the main options is the Warp Text option. Typographers cringe at the thought of have their lovingly crafted typefaces warped like this. I'm not a big fan but just incase you need it here's how it works. Select the text you want to warp and then click on the warp button. This brings up an option box with a dazzling array of options. Have a play yourself to explore all of the options available to you.

The Character Tab - fine-tuning typography

If you want total control over your typography in Photoshop shop you will need to open the Character and Paragraph tabs. They give you precision control over type. Some of the options are repeated from the basic options. Let's start with the Character tab. You will find the character tab icon to the right of the warp icon. Or you can open it by going to Window > Character.

Font family

This is a drop down menu of all the fonts currently active on your system.

Font style

This is whether you choose the regular, bold or italic version of your font face.

Font size

This defines the font size.

Leading

This is also known as line spacing. This is the distance between the lines of text.

Kerning

This is the relationship between particular letters. Most digital fonts do this for you but can override this. For more info see Wikipedia.

Tracking

This is similar to kerning but applies to text as a whole rather than relationships between individual letters.

Vertical scaling

This lets you scale text vertically. Again if you hover over the icon you can drag to resize.

Horizontal scaling

This lets you scale text horizontally. Hovering over the icon you can drag to resize.

Baseline

If you want to move text above or below the baseline you can do it with this optoin.

Color

Sets the color of the text

There are a number of text formatting options after this. A useful one for web design is the underline option which lets you underline links in designs. The language and aliasing options are also available here.

The Paragraph Tab - Formatting text:

Finally the Paragraph tab lets you position blocks of text as you wish. The first row of optoins give you full control over aligning blocks of text. You can left, right and centre align or choose to justify your text.

Indent left margin

This moves text away from the left edge

Indent right margin

This moves text away from the right edge

Indent first line

This indents the first line of the text only

Add space before paragraph

This shifts text down from the start of the paragraph

Add space after the paragraph

This adds padding after the paragraph has finished

Type Mask Tools:

The text tool offers the mask tools to allow you type your text as if it were a selection. Then you can either fill it or apply an effect as you wish. Or you can copy the selection and paste it. In the example below I've used it on the strawberry to generate text with the background of the strawberry. A simple trick that can be very effective.

Burn, Dodge and Sponge Tools

Straight from the darkroom:

These tools come straight from the darkroom floor where the development process could be tweaked using techniques to change the exposure to the surface of the photographic paper. Before we look at the tools lets examine the darkroom techniques to get an idea.

• Dodge - This is where light is blocked out to make portions of the image lighter.
• Burn - This is where light is allowed through specific holes to expose the paper to more light making it darker.

Understanding that more light means darker and less lighter is just how the tools work. Let's start with the dodge tool.

The shortcut for all of these tools is O

Dodge tool - Making selected areas lighter:

The Dodge tool is really a post production tool. If you aren't happy with how the exposure turned out on your photo you can use the Dodge Tool to increase it. Select your brush and you then have three options: shadows, midtones and highlights. The tool will target the tone that you choose. Finally set your exposure. This controls how intense the effect is.

Using the Dodge tool you can easily increase the exposure of photos. In the following example the left edge of the picture has been lightened using the Dodge tool. The range was set to midtones and the exposure at 50%. The effect is slight but compensates for the overexposure of the left hand side.

The Burn Tool - the same in reverse:

The Burn Tool is really the inverse of the Dodge Tool. Instead of compensating for overexposure it allows you to darken areas that have been underexposed.

Sponge Tool - Adjusting Saturation:

When you adjust saturation you adjust the strength of a colour. With the sponge tool you paint with a brush to either increase the saturation of decrease it. In the following example we have a beautiful photo by Barbara Rich. Using the sponge tool we are going to bring out the colours a little more by saturating them. Specifically the boat and the sky have been "sponged" to saturate the colours in these areas. Conversely if you wish to tone down colours select desaturate.

Blur, Sharpen & Smudge Tool

The Blur Tool makes images obscure and softens an image making it look out of focus with a blur effect. The Sharpen Tool goes the other way and makes an image clearer, it sharpens around the edges of an image. Then we have the Smudge Tool which doesn’t blur or sharpen, instead what this tool does is smudge and bump pixels out of place. 

First thing I want you guys to do is select the Blur Tool and change the brush size to 65px.

TIP: Next to where you changed your brush size you’ll notice an option called Mode and Strength, in the future when you use this tool you might want to take note that you can change how strong you want these tools to be by upping the strength, and also changing the Mode to Darken on or Lighten. If darken is selected it just means the tool will focus more on the Darker pixels and if Lighten is selected it will focus more on the lighter pixels.

So to get the ball rolling, we are going to play around with the Blur Tool, just slowly go over theBackground behind the skateboarder until everything goes out of focus like the example below.

After you have done that switch to the Sharpen Tool and go over the face, arms and hands of the skateboarder.

Now select the Smudge Tool and just zig zag up and down on the shirt pocket till it smudges in with the creases of the shirt.

Too easy yeah? These are quick tutorials, in your spare time try and get more practice in to familiarize yourself with these tools.  You’ll notice later on in the tutorials that you can do so much more with these tools then what I am showing you here. Again, these are the basics you need to learn before we start pumping up the heat. See you in the next lesson!

TIP: Press F12 to start over, might come in handy while your testing out the blur, sharpen and smudge tools.