Working with text in Photoshop

Adobe® Photoshop® gained typographic prowess late in its career; in fact, for a long time it was downright painful to get good-looking type out of it. But that’s all changed now. It’s like the folks on the Photoshop team took a look at the typography in InDesign and suddenly said, “Hey, we can do that!” Photoshop lets you tweak kerning, leading, color, hyphenation, and more to your heart’s content. You can set beautiful type in Photoshop… but that doesn’t mean you should.

Figure 1: Vectors and pixels together at last

Note that this vector text sits both behind and in front of the bitmapped image.

To achieve the effect, we copied some of the image onto a new layer, added a layer mask (which is invisible here), and put the text in between the two layers. Note that we converted the text to a layer clipping path (“shape”) so that we didn’t have to send the font to the printer.

Once again, the screen can’t be trusted. Here, the text is vector, but it appears to be soft-edged.

People who want to overlay text on top of pictures often ask us, “Should we use the Type tool in Photoshop, or the features in our page-layout or illustration program?” The answer, as always, is “it depends.”

• If your final output is to a color printer such as an ink-jet or dye-sub printer, anti-aliased type within Photoshop’s bitmapped image often looks better. The hard-edged type from a program such as QuarkXPress looks too jaggy off these low-resolution devices.
• If the text is integrated into your image—you want to apply a wacky filter to it, you want it to sit partially behind part of your image, or something like that—instead of being a separate element overlaying the image, there’s a good chance that you’ll need to create it in Photoshop. While QuarkXPress cannot create transparent text, Adobe InDesign can.
• If you want sharp vector (as opposed to anti-aliased) text, you need to be very careful of what file format you use when saving. In many cases (such as if you save as TIFF), the text gets rasterized—if you’re working with a 225-ppi image, any text you add to that image in Photoshop is similarly 225 ppi. That’s high enough for most images, but it looks crummy for hard-edged type.
• Photoshop’s text controls are cool, but they’re not exactly speedy. In general, the more text you have, the more you should set it in some other program.

So, if you’re setting more than a few words, you should probably set them in QuarkXPress, InDesign, PageMaker, Illustrator, FreeHand, or some other program. But if you’re hell-bent on using Photoshop to lay out text, here are some tips and tricks to help you do so more efficiently.

Requirements

To complete this article, you will need the following software:

Adobe Photoshop CS2

• Try (win)
• Try (mac)
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge:

Basic knowledge of Adobe® Photoshop CS2

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