Free Adobe Photoshop Text Tutorials and Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials

Photoshop Text Effects

When you're done learning the basics of using text inside Photoshop, or if you just want to dive in to the fun stuff, check out our new Photoshop Text Effects section. More text tutorials are being added weekly.

The Type Tool

Whether you're adding a single letter or word, several paragraphs of text, or creating cool text effects, it all begins with Photoshop's Horizontal Type Tool, commonly referred to simply as the "Type tool" since it's the tool you'll use the most often when working with text in Photoshop, even though there's also a "Vertical Type Tool", a "Horizontal Mask Type Tool" and a "Vertical Mask Type Tool" hiding behind it in Photoshop's Tools palette.

The Type Tool's Options Bar

Of course, Photoshop's Type tool would be fairly useless to us without some basic options for things like selecting our font family, style and size. Fortunately, Photoshop gives us three different areas inside the program where we can access not only those three options but plenty more, and the first area we'll look at is the Options Bar, which gives us a general assortment of some of the main options we'll need when working with Photoshop text, including our font options, as well as some anti-aliasing methods for smoothing out those unwanted blocky, jagged looking letters, and some general text alignment options.

The Character Palette

Photoshop's Options Bar gives us quick access to a nice assortment of text options, but it sure doesn't give us all of them. We'll need to visit two other areas inside Photoshop for the full range of text options, and the first of these two areas we'll look at is the Character Palette, where we find not only many of the same options from the Options Bar, but additional options as well, like Leading, Kerning and Spacing options, Vertical and Horizontal Scaling options, Baseline Shift, and various other standard text options like Superscript and Subscript, Underline, Strike though, Faux Bold and Faux Italic.

The Paragraph Palette

The area inside Photoshop where we'll find the remainder of our text options is the Paragraph Palette, grouped by default along with the Character palette, since the two of them work as partners to give us access to every Photoshop text option there is. Here, we'll find the same text alignment options as we'd find in the Options Bar, plus plenty of additional paragraph-specific options like Justification and Indenting, Paragraph Spacing, and an option to enable or disable hyphenation.

Text Warp

Next, we look at Photoshop's Text Warp options, which have been around since Photoshop 6 and still provide us with a quick and easy way to warp our type into various shapes, all while keeping our text completely editable.

Text On A Path

It took a long time for Adobe to finally get around to adding it, but as of Photoshop CS, we can now create text on a path in Photoshop, and you just might be amazed at how easy it is to do.

In the next few days, we'll be adding more Photoshop text tutorials, including a handy "How Do I..." guide, a quick and easy way to find answers to all kinds of Photoshop text-related questions without having to read through pages of content to find what you're looking for.

When you're done learning the basics, head over to our new Photoshop Text Effects section, where you'll find tutorials on creating Photoshop text effects. We'll be adding more tutorials every week, so check back often for the latest additions!