There are other ways to distort your text, the
most controllable being the transform tool. You can find the
transform options under the edit menu. There are two types
of transformation: free transformation and regular transformation.
Free transform - You can access
this through the edit menu, or by typing "ctrl+t"
on a PC, or "command+t" on a mac. This tool allows
you to use most of the transform functions in one step; scale,
rotate, and distort.
Regular transform - this will
bring up a menu of choices and will allow you to select just
one aspect of the text to change.
have used the free transform tool on my text
layer. When active, the text will have a box around it as
you see above. First I am going to scale my text. Since I
have used free transform there is only one way to do this;
grab a corner and pull.
To scale in proportion, hold down shift while
dragging your corner in or out. Everything will look basically
the same as before, just larger or smaller. If you don't hold
down shift you are able to scale the text down or up to whatever
size you want horizontally or vertically. This is useful if
you need the text to fit within a very specific area, but
it may cause distortion that make it unreadable.
To rotate your text hover your pointer just
to the outside of a corner until a bent arrow appears. Once
this appears click and dragon in whatever direction you wish;
the text will follow the movement. Rotate until the text is
rotated to the angle that you desire. If you want your text
to flip in 45 degree incriments, hold down your shift key
while rotating.
To skew your text into a perspective (useful
for putting text on buildings, packages, and trucks) you can
access the skew option under the edit/transform menu.
Once you have selected to skew option, click
and drag on the center square in the bounding box that appears.
Skew until the text works for your image.
Moving on from the transform tool, layer styles
are a fun way to spice up your text. Layer styles can be accessed
under the layer menu. Photoshop 5.5 will have limited use
of styles, while 6.0 and 7.0 will have greater options and
customizability.
Bevel and emboss will give your text a highlight
and shadow, making it look like it's 3D or sunk into a surface.
Make sure that preview mode is checked so that you can see
what is happening to your text as you mess with the options.
The style will affect how the layer effect is applied. Depth
will affect how severe the bevel is applied. Size will be
the size of the highlight and shadow (larger text will require
larger sizes to look 3D). Angle effects what direction the
light is coming from.
You can select what color you want the highlight
and shadow to be. The default is black shadows and white highlights,
but to make this fun we'll use yellow highlights and green
shadows. Try ajusting the contours for different effects (It's
fun to mess with! Play around!) Ready
for Part 3?
All content © J "NeonDragon"
Peffer.
