Adobe Photoshop Text Tutorial: The Paragraph Palette

So far in our look at the options available to us when working with text in Photoshop, we've seen that with the Type Tool selected, several of the main text and font options can be found in the Options Bar, including options for selecting the font family, font style and font size, as well as the anti-aliasing options and basic text alignment options.

We then looked at Photoshop's Character palette, which gives us access to additional options like leading, kerning and tracking, vertical and horizontal scaling, baseline shift, and more.

There's one more place inside Photoshop where we can access text options, which is the topic of this tutorial - the Paragraph palette.

By default, Photoshop groups the Paragraph palette in with the Character palette, which makes sense, since the two palettes are essentially partners when it comes to giving us access to all of Photoshop's text options. While the Options Bar gives us a general assortment of options from each of these palettes, the Character palette focuses specifically on the character-based text options, while the Paragraph palette focuses specifically on the paragraph-based text options. Between the two of them, we have access to every text option there is in Photoshop.

Accessing The Paragraph Palette

The easiest way to access the Paragraph palette is by using the Character and Paragraph palette show/hide icon ("toggle switch") in the Options Bar when you have the Type Tool selected. It's the icon that looks like a Photoshop palette, directly to the right of the Text Warp icon. Clicking on this icon will cause the Character and Paragraph icons to appear on the screen if they were hidden, and will hide them if they were showing on the screen.

Another way to access the Character and Paragraph palettes is by going up to the Window Menu up in the Menu Bar at the top of the screen, where you'll find a list of all of Photoshop's palettes. Palettes with a checkmark beside them are currently showing on the screen, and the ones without a checkmark are currently hidden. Clicking on either the Character or Paragraph palette from the list will cause both of them to appear on the screen, since they're grouped together.

If you have the Character palette currently showing on your screen, you'll notice the Paragraph palette name tab hiding to the right of the Character palette's name tab at the top of the palette group. To bring the Paragraph palette forward and move the Character palette to the background, simply click on the Paragraph palette's name tab.

Text Alignment Options

The first options we have in the top left of the Paragraph palette are the text alignment options, which are the exact same alignment options we saw in our look at the Type Tool's Options Bar.

Using these three options, we can align our text to the left or right, or center-align it. Here's an example of each alignment option below:

Left-aligned text:

Center-aligned text:

Right-aligned text:

Justification Options

While the text alignment options are found in both the Paragraph palette and the Options Bar, these next options - the text justification options - are found exclusively in the Paragraph palette.

There's four justification options to choose from. Starting from the left, we have "Last Left", "Last Centered", "Last Right", and "Justify All".

Here's an example of the effect each of these four options has on a paragraph of text. The difference between them has to do with how the bottom line of text in the paragraph is displayed:

Justify Last Left:

Justify Last Centered:

Justify Last Right:

Justify All:

Indenting Text

Photoshop's Paragraph palette also gives us three options for indenting our text - "Indent Left Margin", "Indent Right Margin", and "Indent First Line". All three options are located directly below the Alignment and Justification options, and as with the Justification options, they're found only in the Paragraph palette.

The option in the top left is the "Indent Left Margin" option, which allows you to add spacing between the left edge of the text block and the text itself.

To the right of the Indent Left Margin option is the "Indent Right Margin" option, which adds spacing between the right edge of the text block and the text itself.

And directly below the Indent Left Margin option is the "Indent First Line" option, which will push the first line of text in a paragraph over to the right by the indent amount specified.

To change the values for any of the Indent options, simply click inside the option's value box and type in a new value. Photoshop CS and CS2 users can also use the "scrubby slider" controls for these options by moving your cursor over top of the option's icon to the left of it's value box, which will turn your mouse cursor into the scrubby slider icon, and then clicking and dragging your mouse left or right to increase or decrease the value. You'll see the value in the value box changing as you drag.

Adding Spacing Before And After Paragraphs

The next two options directly below the Indent options in the Paragraph palette are Paragraph Spacing options.

The Paragraph Spacing options are similar to the Line Spacing (Leading) options found in the Character palette, with the difference between that the Line Spacing options add space between multiple lines of text, while the Paragraph Spacing options add space between multiple paragraphs.

The option on the left is the "Add Spacing Before Paragraph" option, which allows you to add spacing above (before) a paragraph, and the option on the right is the "Add Spacing After Paragraph" option, allowing you to add spacing after (below) a paragraph.

Both of these options are available only in the Paragraph palette, not the Options Bar.

To change the value for either of the options, either click directly inside the value box for the option and type in a new value, or if you're using Photoshop CS or Photoshop CS2, you can use the "scrubby slider" by moving your mouse directly over top of the option's icon to the left of its value box, which will turn your mouse cursor into a scrubby slider icon, and then clicking and dragging your mouse left or right, which will increase or decrease the value. Dragging to the left decreases the value, while dragging to the right increases it.

Hyphenate

The final option down at the very bottom of the Paragraph palette is the Hyphenate option.

The Hyphenate option simply controls whether words in a paragraph are allowed to be hyphenated. The option is controlled by a checkbox to the left of the word "Hyphenate". With the checkbox checked, Photoshop will hyphenate certain words at the end of lines of text in the paragraph which are too long to fit completely inside the text block. With the checkbox unchecked, Photoshop will avoid hyphenating words and will simply take any words at the end of lines of text which are too long to fit inside the text block and bump them down to the next line below.

And with that, we complete our look at the options available to us when working with text and the Type Tool inside Photoshop. Be sure to check out the sections on the Options Bar and the Character palette if you haven't already.