Adobe Photoshop Text Tutorial: Photoshop's Type Tool

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll take a general look at how to use text in your Photoshop work.

Photoshop's Type Tool

Whenever you want to add text to a Photoshop document, whether it's a single letter or several lengthy paragraphs, you use Photoshop's Type Tool, which is found along with all of Photoshop's other tools in the Tools palette. It's the icon roughly halfway down the right column of the Tools palette, which has a capital letter T as its icon.

A quick and easy way to access the Type Tool, rather than selecting it directly from the Tools palette, is to simply press the letter "T" on your keyboard (as in "T" for "Type Tool").

If you look closely at the screenshot of the Tools palette above, you'll see in the "tool tip" which appears whenever you hold your mouse over something in Photoshop (unless you've disabled tool tips in the Preferences) that the Type Tool actually has a longer official name, the "Horizontal Type Tool". That's because when you use it to enter text into your Photoshop document, the text will appear horizontally, rather than vertically, as you'd normally expect. Of course, that might bring up the question, "Does that mean there's a 'Vertical Type Tool' as well? And the answer would be yes.

Additional Type Tools

In fact, the Horizontal Type Tool is only one of four different Type tools that Photoshop offers us in the Tools palette. It's the one that's showing in the Tools palette by default, since it's most likely the only one you'll ever use, but if you hold your mouse down on the Horizontal Type Tool for a moment, a flyout menu will appear, revealing the additional three Type tools (the "Vertical Type Tool", the "Horizontal Type Mask Tool", and the "Vertical Type Mask Tool") hiding behind it:

We'll limit our look at type in Photoshop to the Horizontal Type Tool for now, since it's the main Type tool in Photoshop and it's very likely that you'll never use the other Type tools anyway. Also, we'll refer to the Horizontal Type Tool simply as the "Type Tool" from now on.

To add type to your Photoshop document, with the Type Tool selected, simply click anywhere inside the document window and begin typing.

When You've Finished Typing, Don't Press "Enter" or "Return"
There's one slight problem (well, more of an annoyance than a problem, really, although it can't be helped) when entering type, as you may have already discovered on your own. When you've finished entering your text, your natural instinct would tell you to press Enter (Win) or Return (Mac) to have Photoshop accept your text. Problem is, when you hit Enter or Return, instead of accepting your text, Photoshop simply moves you down to the next line so you can continue typing.

So how do we get Photoshop to accept the text and exit us out of typing mode then? If you have an extended keyboard with a number pad on it, you can use the Enter or Return key on the number pad. If you don't have an extended keyboard, just use your mouse to select one of the other tools from the Tools palette, which will kick Photoshop out of type mode and accept your text at the same time.

Keyboard Shortcuts Don't Work While Typing
This is one of those things that some people find completely obvious while others didn't even think of, but keyboard shortcuts won't work while you're entering text into your Photoshop document. The reason is because, if, for example, you were to use the keyboard shortcut "B" to access the Brush Tool while typing, Photoshop will simply think you wanted to type the letter B into the document, and it will do exactly that. Same with any of the other keyboard shortcuts. Photoshop has no way of distinguishing between regular letters and keyboard shortcuts while in Type mode, so it assumes every letter you type is text. You'll have to exit out of Type mode to use keyboard shortcuts again.