Horizontal Type Tool

You can create and save a Tool Preset for any tool. This will remember settings that you choose. Presets for brushes are much more useful than for some tools. If you wish to use presets, you have the option of either creating a tool preset or a brush preset. Right click on the Tool Presets button to reset the tool to default settings.

Toggle to change the direction of the text between horizontal and vertical.

Select the style of font. This will vary, depending on the font. Some have many styles and others only have a few styles available.

This is a great way to change font size. Highlight the text, then click on the Scrubby Slider and drag to the right or left. Look for the icon of the hand with the left and right arrows.

Dragging to the left will decrease the font size and dragging to the right will increase the font size.

As you drag, you get a live preview of the size.

The Scrubby Slider (immediately above) is a great way to change font size, with a live preview, but you can also change font size with this drop down list.

This is the same as in word processors. If you need a specific font size, select it from this list.

Anti-alias smoothes out lines, which of course, there are a lot of in text. There are some options for different anti-alias methods. Try them out and see which you prefer.

This works the same as in word processors and email programs. Align text to the Left, Centre, or Right.

This option is only valid in Paragraph Text, where text is within a box, not Point Text.

Click in the Font Color box to open the Color Picker to choose a color.

For more details see Color Picker.

Click on this button to open the Warp Text options.

Click on this button to open the Character and Paragraph panels.

There are lots of options in each of these panels to format your text.

This is an image of the Lake District in the UK. We'll add some text and we'll also look at the difference between Point Style text and Paragraph Style text.

Select the Horizontal Type Tool from the toolbar. Like most tools, it shares the button with other tools and the one that is visible will be the last tool used.

After selecting the Horizontal Type tool, move the cursor over your image and you will see the cursor has changed, (highlighted in red).

Just click in your image. It doesn't matter where, as you can easily reposition this at any time.

When you click to add text, a new Type Layer is added immediately above the currently selected layer.

Clicking in your image inserts Point Text. We will look at Paragraph Text later.

In recent versions of Photoshop, when you click to add text, "Lorem Ipsum" placeholder text is automatically inserted. Placeholder text is useful to arrange your design, as it allows you to edit the size and color and placement of the text, before you enter the real text.

The placeholder text is automatically highlighted, so you can type straight away. Your typing will replace the Lorem Ipsum text. In older versions there is no placeholder text, so start typing.

Note: Lorem Ipsum is nonsense text. It doesn't mean anything in any language. I find it helpful, but if you don't like it, you can turn it off in Preferences. See the next step.

On the menu; Edit > Preferences > Type and untick the box Fill new type layers with placeholder text.

When you add text it's usually not the size you want. In a large, high resolution image, it can sometimes be so small that you can hardly see it. I've found the placeholder text helpful.

To resize the text, it must be highlighted. If you immediately replace the placeholder text, it is already highlighted.

If the text is not highlighted, click and drag within the text to highlight, as you would in a word processor.

A method that I use and recommend to select text, is to double click the text layer thumbnail. This will highlight all the text on that layer (as well as selecting the Type tool if it was not already selected.

To change the text size, see the next step.

Once the text is highlighted, either select the size from the dropdown menu, or use the Scrubby Slider. Move your mouse over the Scrubby Slider, then click and hold and move the mouse either left or right to adjust the size (left to decrease, right to increase, the size).

When using the Scrubby slider, you get a live preview, which is helpful in adjusting size.

The text is now large enough to see clearly to edit. It is highlighted, so whatever I type will replace the highlighted text.

Text will be added with the Foreground Color. As shown in the next step, the Foreground Color was white, so the text is white.

You can either change the Foreground Color before adding text, or at any time later.

In this example, white is the Foreground Color.

Foreground and Background Colors are an important set of buttons near the bottom of the Toolbar. For more information, see Foreground and Background Colors.

In this image, white is not a great color for the text, as the text merges into the clouds.

Highlight the text you want to change. Select the text layer and the Type Tool. Then click and drag in the text to highlight.

Take care to click on the text. If you don't click accurately, you might add a new empty Type layer.

See the next step for my recommended method of highlighting text.

An excellent method to highlight text is to double click on the type layer thumbnail. The Type tool is automatically selected and the all the text on the layer is highlighted. If you only want to highlight some of the text, then click and drag within the text, as you would in a word processor.

The Type Layer thumbnail is highlighted in red.

I strongly recommend this method of highlighting text. It's quick, easy and accurate.

The text is highlighted.

On the Options bar, click in the box to change font color.

This will open the Color Picker.

You can either select a color in the Color Picker, or you can select a color directly from your image, which is what I will do in the next step.

To select a color in the Color Picker, select a color in the Color Slider (highlighted in green), then select the tone in the Picked Color (highlighted in pink).

To select a color from the image, see the next step.

With the Color Picker open, move the cursor over the image to an area you want to sample from. You can click multiple times to find just the right color. I clicked several times in the green, to find the tone I wanted (highlighted in pink).

For more details see Color Picker.

The color sampled from the image is shown in the Color Picker.

If you're not happy with it, click in the image again, until you find what you want.

When you are happy, click OK to close the Color Picker.

After applying the new color and closing the Color Picker, your text is still highlighted.

To confirm the text, either click on a different layer, or click on the tick on the Options bar (highlighted in green).

The steps above detail how to insert and use Point Text, which does not automatically wrap.

The alternative is to use Paragraph Text, which does wrap within a textbox. We will look first at inserting Paragraph text.

You can also convert Point text to Paragraph Text and vice versa.

Paragraph Text is contained within a textbox and you can choose text alignment within the textbox; Left, Centre, Right. Just click on the desired button. You don't need to highlight the text to change alignment.

I have changed alignment to Centre Align.

Whichever text you start with, either Point or Paragraph Text, you can easily switch back and forth between them at any time.