Summary: Photoshop's Character and Paragraph panels work as a team to give us full access to every type option available in Photoshop. In this tutorial, we learn about the paragraph-based options in the Paragraph panel like alignment, justification, paragraph spacing, and more!

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photoshop Basics tutorials.

In the previous tutorial, we looked at Photoshop's Character panel, one of the two panels where we find our options for working with type. As its name implies, the Character panel is where we go for character-based text options like leading, kerning and tracking, baseline shift, and so on. As we'll learn in this tutorial, the Paragraph panel contains the paragraph-based options - alignment, justification, paragraph spacing, and more! Together, these two panels give us full access to every single type option available in Photoshop!

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Accessing The Paragraph Panel

As we learned in the previous tutorial, the Character and Paragraph panels are grouped together into a single panel group. One way to access the Paragraph panel is by going up to the Window menu in the Menu Bar along the top of the screen and choosing Paragraph from the list:

Or, you can click on the Character and Paragraph panels toggle icon in the Options Bar along the top of the screen:

This will open the Character and Paragraph panel group. If you selected Paragraph from under the Window menu, the group will automatically open to the Paragraph panel. If you clicked on the toggle icon in the Options Bar, the group will open to the Character panel, but we can easily switch between the two panels simply by clicking on their name tabs at the top of the group. I'll click on the Paragraph tab:

This opens the Paragraph panel:

The Alignment Options

Along the top of the Paragraph panel is a row of icons for aligning and justifying our text. The first three icons on the left of the row are the alignment options. From left to right, we have Left Align Text, Center Text, and Right Align Text:

If these options look familiar, it's because they're the exact same alignment options found in the Options Bar when we have the Type Tool selected. It makes no difference if you set your alignment in the Options Bar or the Paragraph panel. The Left Align Text option is selected for us by default:

Choosing Left Align Text (the default choice) will align your type with the left side of the text box (when using area type):

The Center Text option will center each line of type in the paragraph:

Right Align Text will align the type with the right side of the text box:

The Justification Options

The next four icons in the row along the top of the Paragraph panel are the justification options. From left to right, we have Justify Last Left, Justify Last Centered, Justify Last Right, and finally, Justify All. These options are only available in the Paragraph panel. In fact, all of the options we'll look at from this point on are found exclusively in the Paragraph panel. The only options here that can also be found in the Options Bar are the alignment options we looked at a moment ago:

When we choose any of these justification options, Photoshop re-adjusts the spacing between the words so that every line of type in the paragraph fills the entire width of the text box from left to right, creating a "block" of text. The only difference between the four options is how Photoshop handles the very last line in the paragraph. With Justify Last Left, Photoshop aligns the last line to the left side of the text box:

Justify Last Centered will center the last line:

Justify Last Right will align the last line to the right side of the text box:

Justify All will treat the last line the same as all the other lines, spacing the words out to fill the entire width of the text box:

Up next, we'll learn about the Indent options, the Paragraph Spacing options, and more!

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