Photoshop
text effects
Making distressed type, applying layer effects (such as Bevel and Emboss, Inner Glow, Outer Glow, Inner Shadow, Drop Shadow and Color Fill), and applying filters can produce some really interesting text effects. If you are good at compositing, you can put text on buildings, clothing, etc. There are also many ways to treat text to make it appear wet, chromed or weathered.
Photoshop is the leading professional image-editing software. It excels at compositing, editing high-quality images and working with photos. But when it comes to words and type, Photoshop is not the best tool for the job. If you are looking to typeset copy or create a simple decorative headline, look to your other desktop publishing applications first. But, if you don't mind spending some time and effort, it is possible to create some striking text effects using Photoshop.
WEAK TEXT TOOLS
Photoshop has never been the first choice of designers for typesetting. It wasn't until version 5 when Adobe improved the text tools in Photoshop that they added tracking, kerning, leading and baseline shift. Page-layout applications such as Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress offer superior type tools and should be used for the majority of your typesetting.
Text created in Photoshop is bitmapped. The edges of bitmapped letterforms are not as crisp and clean as those created in vector-graphics programs. Applications such as Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia FreeHand create PostScript font outlines from Bézier curves instead of pixels. No matter what the image, file or printer resolution, the letters in vector-graphics programs come out smooth. Even if you select the crisp, strong or smooth anti-aliased options within the Photoshop text dialog box, using Illustrator or Freehand is still much more effective. When bitmapped letterforms in Photoshop are anti-aliased, they appear blurry. With the anti-aliasing off, the same letterforms can look jaggie.
POWERFUL IMAGE TOOLS
Where Photoshop is weak in text tools, it excels in editing photographs. Three of the more popular reasons for working with text in Photoshop are to:
- incorporate text into an image
- distress, filter or add texture to letterforms
- place an image inside of type
Text effects that were nearly impossible and very time consuming a few years ago are now relatively easy to accomplish. For example, effects such as putting a photo into a character or a line of text now only take minutes to accomplish.
But, because Photoshop generates bitmapped type, you want to avoid using Photoshop for text effects as much as possible. For example, current versions of QuarkXPress versions 4 and newer offer several useful editing and path creating features, including the ability to turn text into paths. Once converted, you can then import images into the letterforms to create smooth headlines. Instead of masking photos with type in Photoshop, you can do the same thing but smoother, faster and easier in QuarkXPress.
Another problem with using bitmapped type is editing the text. Once it is placed in an image (or flattened), it is part of the image and no longer a font. Quite a problem if a line of text needs to be deleted or added. This problem can be avoided if text is saved on a separate type layer, which is one reason you should always save a backup copy of layered images in native Photoshop format.
There are many things you can do to type in Photoshop. If you keep in mind the limited text capability of the program, then you can prevent many problems when creating these effects.