From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Using leading, kerning, and tracking - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Using leading, kerning, and tracking

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- [Instructor] In the next few minutes, we're going to take a look at the leading kerning and tracking options in Photoshop. I'll tap the T key in order to select the type tool and because I want to add to the text layer that I already have, I don't want to add a new one, I'm going to click to the right of the Y in city and then tap return, And then I'll add in Crossroads of the West. Now to select the text, I can click in order to set the insertion point, or I can double-click to select a word or triple-click in order to select the entire line. While we can use the options bar or the contextual task bar to change some of the attributes for the type tool. The properties panel actually has a lot of additional options. I'm going to start by changing the font size. We can either use the scrubby sliders by clicking on the icon for the feature, and dragging left or right. We can choose from any of the different presets. We can enter in a value. Or we can swipe and select the value, and then use the arrow keys to either increase or decrease the size. If we add the shift key, it will increase or decrease the size of any of these options in larger increments. All right. If I want to increase the vertical spacing between the two lines of text, then I'm going to use the leading. Again, I'm going to swipe, and then use the up arrow so that I can visually watch the amount of spacing in the image area. If I want to increase the spacing between all of the characters, then I would use the tracking. Again, I'll swipe it to target it, and then use the up arrow or the down arrow to increase or decrease the amount of space. If I wanted to increase the space between characters, I would place the text insertion point between the characters, and then I would use the kerning. We can select from the menu or we can increase or decrease the value manually. However, at the time of recording, when I choose either metrics or optical, it doesn't seem to be resetting the amount of spacing, so I'm going to choose zero. All right. Let's click away from the text in order to commit to it, And three shortcuts for working with type layers before we wrap up. If you have a different tool selected, say the move tool for example, and you want to select all of the type on the layer as well as automatically select the type tool, we can just double-click on the type layers thumbnail in the layers panel. All right, I'll click again in order to commit to that. If I have the move tool selected, and I position the tool in the image area near the text, I can double-click in order to select all the text, and switch to the type tool. All right, I'll commit to that as well. And finally, if I have the type tool selected, and I want to add a new type layer close to an existing type layer, I can hold down the shift key, and click near the type layer. And instead of selecting the existing type layer, it'll create a new text layer. All right. Let's go ahead and throw that away in the trash, and I'll choose file and then save as. I'll append this with an O2, and save it to the type essentials as a layered Photoshop document.

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