8. Painting, Drawing, and Adding Type

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to paint and draw your own masterpieces and how to add type when you need words to supplement your pictures.

If you want to get technical about it—and I don’t, but bear with me for a moment—the Photoshop Elements Editor is not a paint program; it’s an image editor (hence the name). It’s descended from Adobe’s Big Mama Photoshop, which is also an image editor, and as such both programs are fundamentally designed for making changes to existing pictures. But nothing stays the same forever, and it didn’t take long before artists discovered that the electronic darkroom made an equally wonderful electronic painting studio. These days, it would probably be more difficult to find an artist who doesn’t use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, usually accompanied by a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet (more about this later), than to find one who does. You don’t have to be an artist to make use of the powerful painting, drawing, and type tools in the Editor, but when you try them out, you may discover that you’re more of an artist than you realized.

Painting in an Image

With digital paint and brushes, you can experiment to your heart’s content, and there’s no mess and nothing to throw away or recycle. The Editor offers several different painting tools and an infinite number of paint colors so that you can create just the masterpiece you’ve always had lurking inside you.

Choosing Colors

The first place you’re likely to notice individual colors is on the toolbox, where two color swatches show you the current foreground and background colors. The foreground color is what you get if you paint in the image window, and the background color is what you get if you use the Eraser tool on the Background layer—erasing a transparent layer just results in transparent areas. Click the foreground swatch to open the Color Picker, and then click anywhere in the color ramp on the right and then the color field on the left to choose a new color (see Figure 8.1). When you click OK, the new color replaces the previous foreground color. Changing the background color works the same way, only you need to click—can you guess?—the background color swatch instead.

Figure 8.1. Clicking the brightness ramp on the right, and then clicking in the color field, changes the Foreground color.

Take a look at the numbers in the Color Picker. You’ll notice that each color has two sets of numbers that define it: RGB versus HSB. These represent the two major color models used in computer design. RGB measures colors in terms of red, green, and blue light, which combine to make white light. HSB, on the other hand, stands for hue, saturation, and brightness—all terms discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. This is an artist’s way of conceptualizing colors.

By now you’ve learned enough about Photoshop Elements to suspect that there’s more than just one way to choose new colors. That suspicion is perfectly correct—you’ve also got the Color Swatches panel and the Eyedropper tool. To display the Color Swatches panel, choose Color Swatches from the Window menu. This panel shows you a selection of colors in one of seven libraries: Default, Mac OS, Photo Filter Colors, Web Hues, Web Safe Colors, Web Spectrum, and Windows. Use the pop-up menu at the top of the panel to switch libraries, and click any swatch to make that the foreground color (see Figure 8.2).

Figure 8.2. The Color Swatches panel’s different libraries serve different purposes, but the Default library is the one that gets 99% of the use.

If you haven’t done web design before, you may not be familiar with the concept of Web Safe Colors as shown in the Color Swatches panel. These are the common colors shared by the most basic Mac and Windows system palettes. In the early days of web design, it was important to use these colors to make sure that sites displayed the same on either platform. Today, with changes to system architecture and web technology, you generally don’t need to worry about using web-safe colors. But the library is there, just in case.

If you’ve mixed up a custom color that you want to save, you can create a swatch for it by clicking anywhere in the unoccupied area of the Color Swatches panel. You’ll notice that the cursor turns into a tiny paint bucket, to indicate that you’re about to dump a new color into the panel. After you click, the Color Swatch Name dialog appears so that you can name your new color. To remove a swatch, Alt-click it; the cursor turns into a pair of scissors (see Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.3. Clicking with the scissors cursor removes the swatch.

So far, you’ve seen how to mix your own colors and how to choose from a premade set of colors. The Eyedropper comes down between those two extremes, enabling you to choose a color from anywhere on your screen. Just switch to the Eyedropper, which is located just below the Zoom tool at the top of the toolbox, and click in the image window. Hold down the mouse button as you move the tool around (even outside the image window), and then release it when the foreground color swatch looks right to you (see Figure 8.4). If you want to specify the background color with the Eyedropper, rather than the foreground color, press Alt as you click or click and drag.

Figure 8.4. Here the Eyedropper picks up a gray hue from the stone wall.

Sometimes, you’ll run into color dithering in an image. This is when pixels of multiple colors are placed together to form the illusion of a single color, and it can make it hard to get a good sample with the Eyedropper. Fortunately, you can specify the size of the area the Eyedropper looks at to calculate the new color. In the Options bar, choose Point Sample (a single pixel), 3 by 3 Average, or 5 by 5 Average from the Sample Size pop-up menu. The 5 by 5 Average setting actually combines the colors from 25 pixels and averages them out to produce the color that your eye perceives when you look at that area.

Working with Brushes

How could you paint without a paintbrush? Well, actually, in Photoshop Elements you have several other options—but before getting into those, let’s take a good look at how the Brush tool works. After you switch to the Brush tool, the first thing you’ll probably do is choose a color to paint with. Then you’ll want to move on to the Options bar to fine-tune your paintbrush:

First, choose a brush tip from the drop-down panel at the left end of the Options bar (see Figure 8.5). Photoshop Elements comes with a variety of themed brush libraries, with each brush representing a different tip shape for your paintbrush. First choose a library from the panel menu, and then scroll through the panel to see all your brush options and click the one you want to use. Oh, sure, you can paint just fine with a normal round brush, but wait until you see how many other choices there are!

Figure 8.5. Hundreds of different tips can be used with the Brush tool.

After you’ve chosen a brush, figure out how big you want it to be. The easiest way to do this is to set your preferences so that the cursor shows the size of the brush you’re using, rather than the default cute little paintbrush cursor. (To set this up, choose Display & Cursors from the Preferences submenu in the Edit menu, and then click the button next to Normal Brush Tip in the Painting Cursors area.)

Now skip over to the Brush Dynamics menu in the Options bar. Here you’ll find a group of settings that can change as you use the Brush, including the following (see Figure 8.6):

Figure 8.6. Brush dynamics settings enable you to create more complex brushstrokes.

• Fade—When you set this value above zero, you allow your brushstrokes to tail off as you drag the mouse. Lower values fade more quickly than higher values.

• Hue Jitter—Setting this to a nonzero value makes the paint color vary as you drag the mouse; higher values enable greater variation in color.

• Scatter—Values above zero allow your brushstrokes to move slightly away from the actual line you drag with the mouse, giving you a bumpy line.

• Spacing—Each brushstroke is actually composed of multiple single applications of the brush tip, as becomes apparent if you set the Scatter value high enough. This setting controls how close each brush daub is to the last.

• Hardness—Most of the time, you’ll want your brushstrokes to have slightly soft, fuzzy edges. This slider enables you to determine just how soft or hard each brush tip is.

• Angle—Just like a real paintbrush, the Brush’s tips can be rotated to any angle. This makes no difference with a round brush, but when you’re using a differently shaped brush, it can have a huge impact on the brushstrokes’ appearance.

• Roundness—This setting controls the vertical-to-horizontal proportions of the brush tip.

When you use these brush dynamics settings, you can change them as often as you want during a painting session. A more intuitive and convenient way to change them, however, is to use a pressure-sensitive tablet, such as those made by Wacom, so that you can vary settings with the pressure or angle of your stylus. When a tablet is installed, a menu just to the left of the Brush Dynamics menu becomes available (see Figure 8.7), enabling you to turn on pressure sensitivity for each of the following:

Figure 8.7. Stylus pressure can control any or all of these variables.

• Size

• Opacity

• Hue jitter

• Scatter

• Roundness

Applying Paint in Different Ways

Two Brush settings in the tool Options bar have a huge impact on the range of painting effects you can produce: opacity and blending modes. Opacity is pretty simple to understand. At 100%, anything you paint completely covers whatever’s underneath. At lower opacity settings, your brushstrokes allow existing colors to show through to a greater or lesser degree (see Figure 8.8). An opacity setting of 0%, of course, means that your painting will have no effect whatsoever.

Figure 8.8. 100% opacity hides the brick background completely; 50% opacity allows it to show through.

Blending modes, shown in the Options bar in the Mode pop-up menu, are more complicated. When you use a mode other than Normal, which is the default, you’re allowing the new color you’re applying to blend with any existing colors beneath it. Just how the two colors blend depends on which mode you choose (see Figure 8.9). There are 27 of them, and they’re listed in Table 8.1. As with so many features of the Editor, the best way to get a feel for how blending modes actually affect your image is just to try them out. Then try them again, and after that try them some more. Experimentation is the key to success.

Figure 8.9. The numbers in this image were drawn with the following blending modes: Normal, Darken, Color Dodge, Overlay, Linear Light, Difference, and Luminosity, in that order.

Table 8.1. Blending Modes

Now, you’re thinking, what about these extra painting tools? Here you go—here’s what you’ve got available:

• Airbrush—This isn’t really a separate tool, although long ago in the early days of Photoshop it was. Now it’s just a button on the Options bar for the Brush tool. When you use the Brush in Airbrush mode, you apply more paint the longer you sit on a particular spot in the image, just as you would with a real airbrush (see Figure 8.10). Click and hold with the Airbrush, and you’ll see the paint spreading out from the brush as you watch.

Figure 8.10. Where I paused and held the cursor in one place for a few seconds, pools of paint developed.

• Impressionist Brush—Although it only works on existing pixels (meaning that you can’t use it to paint all by itself), the Impressionist Brush is a fun and creative tool with all kinds of possibilities. It’s located under the Brush tool in the toolbox, along with the Pencil. When you paint over existing colors with the Impressionist Brush, it swirls and attenuates the shapes, giving an impressionistic effect (see Figure 8.11). You can control exactly how impressionistic it makes your images by changing the Style, Area, and Tolerance settings in the options menu that appears to the right of the Opacity controls in the Options bar.

Figure 8.11. The left side of the image has been painted over with the Impressionist Brush.

• Pencil—The Pencil works very much like the brush, except for two things. First, it’s always hard-edged, and second, it can function as an eraser as well as a pencil if you turn on the Auto Erase setting in the Options bar. With Auto Erase on, drawing in an area that’s filled with the Foreground color changes it to the background color, and vice versa (see Figure 8.12).

Figure 8.12. The Pencil erases to the background color, in this case white, when Auto Erase is active.

• Erasers—These tools include the regular Eraser, the Background Eraser, and the Magic Eraser. The regular Eraser is the simplest to use. Click and drag to erase pixels, leaving behind either transparent areas (on a layer) or areas filled with the background color (on the Background layer). You can use it in any of three modes: Brush, with soft edges and any tip shape; Pencil, with hard edges and any tip shape; or Block, as a hard-edged square. The Background Eraser and the Magic Eraser both convert the Background layer to a regular layer when you apply them. The Background Eraser erases the color you click on without affecting other colors, enabling you to erase the background around objects. The Magic Eraser, on the other hand, works similarly but it extends its effects to similarly colored areas around where you apply it, in order to erase large blocks of color at once (see Figure 8.13).

Figure 8.13. Clicking in the maroon area with the Magic Eraser (left) deletes all the maroon pixels from the image (right).

• Paint Bucket—Click on any color to repaint the entire area filled with that color with the foreground color. In the Options bar, Contiguous determines whether the Paint Bucket replaces all of the specified color in the image or only the section you click (the contiguous area; see Figure 8.14), and the Tolerance value determines how close colors must be to be considered the same color for the Paint Bucket’s purposes.

Figure 8.14. Because Contiguous is checked in the Options bar, clicking here doesn’t replace all the beige with peach, just this section.

• Gradient—After choosing this tool, choose a gradient from the Options bar, or double-click the gradient swatch currently showing in the Options bar to bring up the Gradient Editor. Click and drag to fill the image window or the selected area with the gradient (see Figure 8.15).

Figure 8.15. The color on the left of the gradient swatch in the Options bar starts where you click to begin drawing the gradient.

LET ME TRY IT

Painting and Erasing

Let’s get some practice with the painting tools. We’ll start the artwork by creating a colorful gradient background, then add some strokes of paint, remove excess paint, and give the whole thing a good going-over with the Impressionist Brush to smooth out any rough edges.

1. With a new, blank image open in the Editor’s Full Edit mode, switch to the Gradient tool.
2. Choose a gradient from the drop-down panel in the Options bar, then click and drag in the image window to create the background. Repeat as many times as you like, trying different angles and changing your starting and ending positions.
3. Switch to the Brush tool, making sure the Mode menu in the Options bar is set to Normal, and choose a color.
4. Get creative! Paint whatever you want in the image window, using different colors if you like (see Figure 8.16).
   

   Figure 8.16. Clearly, freehand drawing is not my strong suit.

   

5. Keeping the Brush tool active, change its blending mode to Difference and try painting a few strokes.
6. Switch to the Eraser tool, setting its Opacity at 100%, and erase a few spots in the image.
7. Change the Eraser’s Opacity to 30% and erase a few more spots. See the difference? The eraser is only partially effective, leaving behind 70% of the colors it passes over (see Figure 8.17).
   

   Figure 8.17. Using the Eraser with an irregularly shaped brush tip and varying Opacity settings adds some texture to the grass.

   

8. Switch to the Impressionist Brush and finish off the image by covering with impressionist strokes. Try different brush sizes and see how the change affects your results (see Figure 8.18).
   

   Figure 8.18. It’s still not great art, but you can definitely see the possibilities for someone with more skill than I have.

   

   Click the Impressionist Brush icon in the Options bar to see a drop-down panel that shows a few other options for this tool: Style, Area, and Tolerance. Style controls how wiggly the brushstrokes, Area determines how far the brush’s influence extends with each stroke, and Tolerance determines how much contrast must exist for the brush to recognize a color difference as the edge of an object.

9. When you’re happy with the image, save and close it. It’s automatically added to the Organizer.

Drawing with the Shape Tools

The Editor’s shape tools enable you to draw a wide variety of geometrically perfect shapes that you can easily recolor any time during the design process and resize without resampling as your design evolves. They include the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Line, and Custom Shape tools. You can, of course, draw squares and circles by pressing Shift while using the Rectangle and Ellipse tools, and the Polygon tool can produce any symmetrical shape from triangles to hectagons (100 sides—check out Figure 8.19).

Figure 8.19. Looks like a circle, doesn’t it? That’s because each of its 100 sides is so short.

Creating Standard Shapes

To draw a shape, simply pick the tool you want to use (Ctrl-click the visible Shape tool in the toolbox to see the others), and then click and drag in the image window, pressing Shift as you draw if you want to constrain the shape. Constraining rectangles and ellipses turns them into squares and circles, of course, and constraining polygons and lines controls the angles at which they can be tilted. You can change the shape’s color and layer style using the controls in the Options bar before you draw it or after, as you prefer.

By default, drawing a shape creates a new layer for that shape to occupy. If you want to put more shapes on the same layer, you can press Shift as you draw; subtract the new shape from the layer by pressing Alt as you draw (see Figure 8.20). Buttons on the Options bar enable these functions without your having to press any keys. Use these if you want to add, subtract, intersect, or exclude several shapes in a row.

Figure 8.20. By drawing the rounded rectangle in Subtract mode, I’ve removed that area from the polygon.

At this point, if you’re paying attention, you’re probably thinking the following: Press Shift to constrain the shape and press Shift to add the shape to the current layer? How does that work? It’s a good question, and here’s the answer. If you want to constrain a shape, press Shift after you start dragging the shape tool and hold the key down until you complete the shape. If, on the other hand, you want to add a new shape to the current layer, press Shift before you start drawing; in this case, you can release the Shift key as soon as the shape starts to appear on the layer. And if you want to do both—add a shape to the current layer and constrain its proportions or angle—press Shift before beginning to draw, and then let the key up, then press Shift again as you complete the shape. It might sound tricky, but it will only take a couple of tries to get used to it.

When you create a new shape, the Editor fills it with the color shown in the Options bar, which is the same as the foreground color. To switch colors, click the color square in the Options bar and choose a new color in the Color Picker or click the triangle next to the color square and choose from the color swatches. This changes the color of the selected shape, if there is one, and whatever shapes you create after that.

Other options vary depending on the tool you’re using:

• Line—Enter a Weight value in pixels to determine the width of the line.

• Rounded Rectangle—Enter a Radius value to control just how rounded the corners of the rectangle are (see Figure 8.21).

Figure 8.21. The red rectangle’s corner radius is 10 pixels, and the pink rectangle’s radius is 25 pixels. The yellow and purple rectangles’ radii are 50 pixels and 100 pixels, respectively.

• Polygon—Naturally, you have to enter the number of sides you want your polygon to have, from 3 to 100.

The Options bar also contains a Style drop-down panel (see Figure 8.22). Click the triangle next to the Style swatch to see the available styles. The list looks just like the Effects panel (turn to Chapter 10, “Applying Filters and Special Effects,” to learn more), except that you can only see one category of effects at a time. To see a different category, click the double triangle to display the panel menu and choose the category you want.

Figure 8.22. Layer styles are easily accessible from the Options bar for the shape tools.

Apply any style to the current layer by clicking its swatch. If the results aren’t quite what you pictured, you can edit the style settings by choosing Style Settings from the Layer menu’s Layer Style submenu (see Figure 8.23). Here you can change the characteristics of each component of the style, such as the opacity of a shadow.

Figure 8.23. With the Style Settings dialog, you can customize styles to your shapes.

Modifying Shapes

The best thing about shapes is that you can go back and change them after the fact, and they’ll still be as sharp and crisp as when they were first created. This is because Photoshop Elements doesn’t actually create pixels to build each shape until you print or export the image. A special tool at the bottom of the Shape tools list, the Shape Selection tool, is used for selecting, moving, and resizing shapes.

After you’ve switched to the Shape Selection tool, you can do any of the following:

• Click a shape to select it, or Shift-click to select multiple shapes, and then drag the shape or shapes around the image window to move them.

• Click a shape or multiple shapes and drag one of the border handles to resize it. Press Shift while you’re resizing a shape to retain the current proportions.

• After resizing, click Commit to finalize the change or Cancel to return to the previous size.

• Select multiple shapes on the same layer and click Combine on the Options bar to turn them into a single shape (see Figure 8.24); note that you can no longer modify the components separately.

Figure 8.24. The shapes in the upper left are separate, but the circles in the lower right have been combined into a single shape.

Using the Custom Shape Tool

Geometrical shapes can only take you so far. Eventually you’re going to want to draw something else, and that’s going to require you to use the Custom Shape tool. It comes with 23 shape libraries that contain a total of 568 shapes, each of which can be added to your images at any size and in any color, as many times as you want. A shape might form the basis for a logo, provide ornaments around the edges of a scrapbook page, or serve as a “cookie-cutter” for a photo.

To start, of course, you choose the Custom Shape tool from the pop-up list of shape tools. Once the Custom Shape tool is active, you’ll see a drop-down panel in the Options bar that contains the selection of available shapes (see Figure 8.25). Choose a library by clicking the double triangle at the upper-right corner of the panel, and then choose a shape from the library. Most of the library names give you some idea what kind of shapes they contain (Flowers is pretty clear, for instance), but others are less revealing (Objects, anyone?). If you want to see all the shapes simultaneously, you can choose All Elements Shapes from the top of the libraries list.

Figure 8.25. Hundreds of shapes are available for use with the Custom Shape tool.

To create a shape in your image, just click and drag. Press Shift as you drag to constrain the shape’s proportions to match the original. The new shape, on its own new layer, uses the color and style specified in the Options bar (see Figure 8.26), and you can choose a new color by clicking the Options bar color swatch to open the Color Picker or doing the same with the foreground color swatch in the toolbox. Clicking the triangle next to the Options bar color swatch brings up a drop-down version of the Color Swatches panel (see Figure 8.27).

Figure 8.26. The apple shape uses a Neon style that turns it into an outline.

Figure 8.27. The Options bar for shape tools also offers quick access to the Color Swatches panel.

Of course, you can use the Add, Subtract, Intersect, and Exclude buttons in the Options bar to build more complex shapes from combinations of shapes (both standard and custom; see Figure 8.28). Press Shift before you click to draw a shape, and the new shape is added to the current layer rather than placed on a new layer. Press Option as you draw and the new shape is subtracted from the current layer.

Figure 8.28. By subtracting one shape from another, I’ve created a tree-shaped hole in a tree.

The Cookie Cutter tool, located just below the Type tools in the toolbox, is a handy way to trim a picture in a custom shape, and you probably won’t be surprised to learn that it uses the same shape libraries as the Custom Shape tool. However, using the Custom Shape tool to mask images offers two huge advantages over the Cookie Cutter tool. First, it’s nondestructive, meaning that the rest of the image is still there, you just can’t see it while the mask is in place. Second, you can reshape the mask on-the-fly; you’re not stuck with the first shape you picked out.

LET ME TRY IT

Trimming Pictures to Custom Shapes

Let’s take a look at how you can trim pictures with the Cookie Cutter tool and create a layer clipping mask with the Custom Shape tool (or any shape tool, for that matter):

1. Open an image in the Editor’s Full Edit mode.
2. Switch to the Cookie Cutter tool and choose a cutter shape from the Shape pop-up panel in the Options bar.
3. In the Options bar’s Shape Options pop-up panel, choose whether you want to be able to alter the shape’s size or proportions as you draw it. I usually stick with the Defined Proportions setting so that the shape remains recognizable, but I can draw it at any size.
4. Check the Crop box in the Options bar if you want the Editor to trim all the blank areas around the edge of your Cookie Cutter shape when you’re done drawing it.
5. Click in the image and drag to draw the shape. Drag the corner handles of the marquee surrounding the shape to resize it.
6. When you’re happy with the shape, click the green Accept button at the bottom of the marquee. Photoshop Elements deletes all of your image that lies outside the Cookie Cutter shape; those parts of the image are irretrievably gone.
7. Click the Undo button to back up and restore the image to its uncropped state.
8. Now switch to the Custom Shape tool. Choose the same shape that you used with the Cookie Cutter tool.
9. Double-click the entry for the image’s Background layer in the Layers panel to turn it into a regular layer. In the New Layer dialog, assign the new layer its own name or just click OK to accept the default name (see Figure 8.29).
   

   Figure 8.29. Layer names are useful if you have a lot of layers or if you have multiple similar layers, but most of the time you can use the default layer names (Layer 0, Layer 1) with no problem.

   

10. Click and drag to draw the shape in the image window; press Shift as you drag if you want to constrain the shape to its original proportions.
11. Drag the image layer (formerly the Background layer) above the shape layer in the Layers panel, then Alt-click the line between the two layers. This turns the shape layer into a mask that hides the portions of the image layer that are outside its boundaries, making those areas transparent (see Figure 8.30).
    

    Figure 8.30. The image on the layer above the shape becomes the shape’s fill.

    

12. Modify the shape layer in whatever ways you want. You can transform it (move, resize, rotate, or skew), draw more shapes on the same layer to add to the mask, simplify it and then paint on it—whatever you want. Meanwhile, the original image is still complete and untouched on its own layer.

After you’ve turned the shape layer into a clipping mask, the shape itself is no longer visible as such, but you can move it around, resize it, and modify it just as you would do with any shape. You can also move and resize the image to fit better within the shape. Just switch to the Move tool and click the image layer in the Layers panel, and then make your changes.

Adding and Editing Type

It’s sad, but true: Sometimes pictures just aren’t enough and you need to add a word or two (or more). For those times, the Editor has both the Horizontal Type tool and the Vertical Type tool, along with their cousins the Horizontal Type Mask tool and the Vertical Type Mask tool. Type comes in two flavors: single-line text and paragraph text, in which text can wrap around to start a new line if it hits the margin you’ve defined.

Creating Type

At its simplest, creating type takes just a single click, followed by some typing. If you choose either of the type tools and click in an image window, the Editor creates a new layer to hold your type, and all you have to do is type the words you want to use. This sort of text is called single-line or point type, because the only way you can start a new line is by pressing Enter. Paragraph type, on the other hand, has defined side margins and wraps to the next line when it reaches the margin (see Figure 8.31). To create paragraph type, you click and drag to define a text box, and then start typing.

Figure 8.31. Paragraph type is what you’re familiar with from using word processors and email clients.

Unlike a word processor, Photoshop Elements doesn’t have a spell-checking feature, so type carefully. If you’re inserting a lot of text—more than a sentence or two—you may find it most efficient to type your text in a word processor, spell-check and edit it there, and then copy and paste it into the Editor. There’s no effective limit on the amount of text you can have in a single text block, although Photoshop Elements isn’t really set up to handle designs with more text than pictures.

When you’ve finished, click the Commit button in the Options bar (see Figure 8.32) or switch to another tool. Until you perform one of these actions, no menu commands will work—when you’re using a type tool, you’re in total type mode. Keep that in mind if you’re a keyboard shortcut junkie, as I am, because if you start typing keyboard shortcuts while using a type tool you’ll end up just inserting those letters into your text.

Figure 8.32. The Cancel and Commit buttons for type look like the ones you’ve seen for adjustments in Quick Fix mode and with the Crop tool.

When you add type, the Editor creates it in the color shown in the Options bar, which is the same as the foreground color. Click the color swatch to open the Color Picker or click next to it to see the Color Swatches panel. Choosing a different color applies that new color to any type that’s selected and to any type you create after that.

To edit text, or change its attributes, first you have to select it. Selecting some or all of the characters in an existing text block is simple. Just make sure you’re on the right layer, switch to the Type tool, and click and drag in the type to select the characters you want to modify (see Figure 8.33). You can modify the attributes of all the type on the selected layer or layers by making sure the text cursor isn’t active (click the Commit button if necessary) and then making your changes. And when the text cursor is active (blinking), you can make color and formatting changes that will apply to whatever you type next without affecting the unselected type.

Figure 8.33. Once selected, the highlighted type can be retyped, recolored, or resized.

Formatting Type

The fun part about adding type is the wonderful range of choices you have for typeface and style. From left to right, here’s what the Type tool’s Options bar has to offer (see Figure 8.34):

Figure 8.34. The Type tool’s Options bar contains more menus than most.

• Font—The Editor can use any font installed in your system, and the menu displays a sample of each font next to its name.

• Style—Many fonts come with several variations, such as bold and italic, and this second menu is where you choose which version of the font you want to use.

• Size—Normally, type is sized in points (72 to the inch), with a font’s letters measuring approximately the same as its point size from the top of the ascenders to the bottom of the descenders. Don’t get hung up on exact measurements, though, unless you need to match existing type. Just choose the size that looks best in your design.

• Anti-aliasing—When it’s turned on, the anti-aliasing feature blurs the edges of each text character to make them look smoother on-screen (see Figure 8.35). This feature shouldn’t be used with art you plan to print, but it’s a must for type that will be displayed onscreen.

Figure 8.35. The letter on the left uses anti-aliasing; the letter on the right doesn’t.

• Character Styles—Use these buttons to produce styles that aren’t already included in the font you’re using. The bold and italic styles aren’t perfect, but they’re acceptable in a pinch. Along with underline and strikethrough, these styles work just like similar styles in a word processor—just select the type you want to style and click the appropriate button.

• Alignment—Also known as justification, these settings determine which sides of a text block are aligned. Click the button and choose Left Align Text, Center Text, or Right Align Text from the menu. This setting applies to all the selected text or, if no selection is active, to the paragraph in which the text cursor is inserted.

• Leading—This old printer’s term refers to the vertical spacing between lines of text (see Figure 8.36). Like type size, it’s measured in points, and you can set the leading to any value you like. Auto leading is 120% of the point size, which works out to a distance of 12 points from the base of one 10-point line to the base of the next.

Figure 8.36. Leading was original achieved by adding strips of lead between rows of metal type, hence the name.

• Color—Naturally, in Photoshop Elements your type can be any color you want. Click the color swatch in the Options bar to open the Color Picker and choose a color, or click the triangle next to the color swatch to see a panel of preset color swatches.

• Warp—Click this button to squish and stretch type into a custom shape. We’ll look more at warping text later in the chapter.

• Orientation—Click here to switch the selected type layer from vertical to horizontal orientation or vice versa.

• Layer Style—This button enables you to apply layer styles to type layers without opening the Effects panel.

Applying Layer Styles to Type

Layer styles are particularly useful with type, because plain, undecorated type often doesn’t stand out over a photo. Applying a simple glow or drop shadow can make all the difference when this problem comes up. For this reason, the Editor supplies you with quick and easy access to layer styles when a type layer is active and you’re using the Type tool, but no text is selected. The Style button (really a pop-up panel; see Figure 8.37) gives you quick access to all the layer styles found in the Effects panel.

Figure 8.37. Like shapes, type in Photoshop Elements is often styled, so you have easy access to the Style panel from the Options bar.

To apply layer styles, click next to the style swatch to display a menu similar to the Effects panel and then click the style you want to use. (More style categories are available in the panel menu.) Choose Style Settings from the Layer menu’s Layer Style submenu if you want to modify how the style is applied to this particular layer. Some styles may look “off” when applied to smaller type because the narrow strokes of the letters don’t provide enough space to show all the style’s components. To fix this, you can choose Scale Effects from the Layer Style submenu and set the scaling percentage lower to size the effect more appropriately for the type size you’re using (see Figure 8.38).

Figure 8.38. The bevel on the upper “mojo” is way too big. Scaling the effect on the lower “mojo” produces a much more appropriate look.

Warping Type

Ever seen the children’s television show Word World? All its animal characters are made out of the letters of their names, reshaped to look like what they are. That’s what warping type is all about (see Figure 8.39). It’s a way to have fun with type while still getting your message across.

Figure 8.39. Is the word shaped like the object, or is the object built from the word?

The first thing to remember is that warping applies to the entire layer, not individual characters. If you only want to warp part of a word or one word in a phrase, you’ll need to place those characters on a layer of their own. Second, you can’t warp type to which you’ve applied the Faux Bold style.

LET ME TRY IT

Warping a Type Layer

To warp a type layer, you need to first make it the active layer and switch to the Type tool. Then follow these steps:

1. Click the Warp button on the Options bar. This brings up the Warp Text dialog (see Figure 8.40), where you can choose a shape for the type layer and then control how that shape is applied horizontally and vertically.
   

   Figure 8.40. Each warp shape can be horizontal or vertical.

   

   Warp shapes are more apparent if you use all capital letters in your type. The ascenders and descenders on lowercase letters tend to leave gaps in warp shapes.

2. Choose an option from the Style pop-up menu. The shape next to each style give you an idea of the shape it produces, but the results will vary depending on the proportions of your type (Is it a long word? A very short one?), the orientation you choose, and the Bend and Distortion settings you make.
3. If you want, switch to a Vertical orientation. All the styles start out with a Horizontal orientation, which makes them match the shapes in the Style pop-up menu, but you should be sure to try Vertical with each of them when you’re exploring the warping possibilities.
4. Drag the Bend slider to control how extreme the shape is: how wide its wide areas are and how narrow its narrow parts are. Increasing the Bend value in Figure 8.36, for example, first flattens out the fish and then turns it to face in the other direction as the value goes into positive numbers.
5. Drag the Distortion sliders to distort the basic shape upward and downward and from side to side (see Figure 8.41).
   

   Figure 8.41. Infinite variations on each shape are possible with different Bend and Distortion settings.

   

6. Click OK when you’re happy with the warped type’s appearance.
7. To adjust the settings for this type at any time, just return to that layer with the Type tool active and click the Warp button in the Options bar again.

Remember, you can edit warped type and apply layer styles to it, and you can also go back to the Warp Text dialog and change the settings. To remove a warp effect, select the type layer, switch to the Type tool, click the Warp button, and then choose None from the Style pop-up menu.