Copying Text into Photoshop

Mar

2015

l_plate You've searched the internet and found a great quote, song lyric , or passage from a poem or story that you would love to turn into a poster or add to a banner you are working on in Photoshop. Do you have to copy it down and then type it into your piece? Well you can and I did until I found a better way. We can actually copy and past text into a Photoshop layer and edit it just as though we had typed it in word by word! Here is a simple step by step to get you on your way.

You will find a link to a free downloadable copy of the poster I created using this technique, at the end of the tutorial.

First,in Photoshop, open up the piece you are working on or create a new workspace as I have here. Mine is a preset for a 16 x 20inch x 300dpi with transparent background that I use to create posters. Now click on the Type tool to add a new Text layer. Select the font, size and colour you want the text to be in your document. This can be changed later. I've chosen Palantino, 18 and black. Now, instead of typing words, we are going to use the cursor to draw a text box by dragging out a box shape. Move the cursor to where you want to begin, I started at the top left corner and filled the page. Draw the size you think you want for your project. It does not matter if it is not centred or exactly where you want it because we can fix that later.

Now go to the source page the text you want, is on. It can be a web page, a word document, text. It does not matter, as long as you can highlight it and use copy. Words that are part of a jpg will not work. Highlight the text, right click and select Copy (you can also use Control C if on a PC). I am using the poem Desiderata. I've loved the words to this since discovering it in High School. It is, by the way still under copy right so you cannot use it in commercial projects without the permission of the copyright holders.

Now, back to our Photoshop piece. Go to Edit and you should find the Paste button is active:

Press Paste and your copied text will be pasted into your text box:

You are now free to edit the text in exactly the same ways you can when you type directly into a text layer. I'm going to increase my text size to fill the box, change the colour, highlight and change the poem title to a different font. I've also right clicked on my text layer and tweaked the text by ticking Strong and Sharp to bring up my text a little more. right_click

I can if I want add a layer style in the manner or make further changes to colour and font. My text layer is fully editable.

Just a reminder, you musthave prepared your Photoshop document before you copy your source text. If you do it the wrong way, when you click Edit on the toolbar, the Paste tool will not be highlighted. Please note, I added a new layer under my transparent one and filled it with white for better clarity in the sample pictures and then selected the Type layer again before going to my source document.

Photoshop will convert the copied and pasted text into the font, size and colour you have selected in the Photoshop Type Toolbar. You can edit this after pasting your text into the box.

Here is my finished poster. I made a separate layer for the Title and changed the text colour to white. Click on the image for an 8 x 10 inch size you are welcome to download and print for personal use. I'm hanging one on my wall. .

The background image is one I took myself the day after the rain had stopped and the flood waters began to recede from our valley, back in 2011.

I looked at the finished poster and decided that I'd prefer the text justified, that is, to finish in a straight line both on the left and the right. This is achieved quite simply when you have your text in a text box as we have here. Select the text layer and open the Character Properties box. If you don't have the shortcut in your workspace toolbars, go to Window and you will see it in the list. Click on it and the property box opens. It has two tabs Character which opens by default, and Paragraph. Click Paragraph and you are presented with alignment options and sliders to tweak them.

Hover you mouse over each little diagram and Photoshop will tell you what it does. I've used Justify with Last Left. This means that any words left in a paragraph that are not a full sentence will align Left. There is a tick box, Hyphenate, at the bottom. Leaving this ticked tells Photoshop to hyphenate long words at the end of sentences. I unticked it for this project because I did not like the result. Instead Photoshop spreads the characters and spaces in the affected sentences a little more to keep the justification. Centre your Text box on your image. I like the result much better than the left aligned one above. Here is my justified version. Take your pick. :D

...fin...