10 Essential Tips for Working with Text in Photoshop

Mike Rankin

A picture’s worth a thousand words but occasionally you may need to include a few words in your pictures. So here’s a batch of tips and shortcuts for working with text in Photoshop CS6. Add them to your repetoire and you’ll use them again and again.

1. To select all the characters in a layer, double-click the layer’s type icon in the Layers panel.

2. To fill text with the foreground color, press Alt+Backspace on Windows or Option+Delete on the Mac. To fill text with the background color, press Ctrl+Backspace on Windows or Command+Delete on the Mac.

3. To adjust point size from the keyboard in 1 pt increments, press Ctrl+Shift+< or Ctrl+Shift+> on Windows. On the Mac, press Command+Shift+< or Command+Shift+>. To adjust point size from the keyboard in 5 pt increments, press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+< or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+> on Windows and Command+Shift+< or Command+Shift+> on the Mac.

4. To adjust kerning, put your cursor between two letters and press Alt+Left/Right Arrow on Windows or Option+Left/Right Arrow on the Mac. You can adjust tracking with the same shortcuts if you select a range of text.

5. To create a container of a specific size for paragraph text, Alt+click on Windows or Option+click on the Mac with the Type tool. This opens the Paragraph Text Size dialog box, where you can enter values for Width and Height, and then click OK.

6. To access Photoshop’s spell checking and find/replace features, right click on text and choose from the contextual menu.

7. You can switch between point text and paragraph text, by clicking on a type layer in the Layers panel and choosing either Type > Convert To Point Text or Type > Convert To Paragraph Text. Note that when you convert paragraph type to point type, any overflow text will be deleted.

8. To change text orientation from horizontal to vertical (or vice versa) select a type tool, and click the Text Orientation button in the Options bar.

9. To transform point type while in edit mode, hold down Ctrl on Windows or Command on the Mac. This will display a bounding box around the type that you can drag to scale, skew, or rotate the type.

10. To scale paragraph type, hold Ctrl+Shift on Windows or Command+Shift on the Mac as you drag a corner handle of the bounding box.

Bonus (because 10 tips is never enough):

To hang punctuation, choose Roman Hanging Punctuation from the Paragraph panel menu.