As your skills improve in Photoshop, you’ll find that you want to do everything faster and with less clicks. Luckily, Photoshop provides us with more than one way to do many things. Here are five tips and tricks for speeding up how you work with Type.
1. Highlight Your Text Really Fast
If you’re working on an image and want to highlight your text AND switch to the Type tool at the same time, double click the “T” icon in the Layers palette. And now you can edit away.
2. Change Your Fonts Without Having To Keep Going Back To The Font Drop Down Box
Highlight the type that you want to change in your image and the press Ctrl+ H (PC) or Cmd+H (Mac) to hide the highlighting. Then, in the Tool Options Bar, click once in the Font field, now use the Up and Down Arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll through your installed typefaces. This is a MAJOR timesaver.
3. See The Correct Color Of Your Type
If you select your type in Photoshop and then change the color using the color picker on the toolbar, you won’t see the correct color, rather you see a sort of inverse color. You’ll then need to deselect the highlighted text to see the color properly.
Here’s how to speed this process up. After you’ve added and committed your type, just click on the Color Swatch on the Tool Options Bar at the top of the screen. Changing the colors from here allows you to see the type update on the fly.
4. Edit Text Without Highlighting It First
Click on your Type layer in the Layers palette. Then open the Character palette (choose Window > Character if it’s not open). Now you can choose any options you want from the Character palette and the changes happen instantly.
5. Make Your Text Preview Larger.
When you’re choosing a font from the drop down list on the tool options bar, Photoshop will display the name of the font with a small sample alongside it. If you find that the sample is too small to actually make out, you can change it’s size by going to Edit > Preferences > Type.
Choose from Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large or Huge to change the Font Preview Size.
This is what Extra Large looks like;
So there you have it! You should be a Photoshop Type Speed Demon if you start using these tricks.
What other Type tricks do you use?
Jennifer FarleyJennifer Farley is a designer, illustrator and design instructor based in Ireland. She writes about design and illustration on her blog at Laughing Lion Design.
