Titling and Journaling are very important to us in scrapbooking – so much feeling and emotion can be conveyed by our choice of font. Once the font is chosen, Photoshop has a whole lot of wonderful options that give us control over the position and look of the characters.
Look at this very simple example:

Picture 1

Do you see how just simply changing a few things about the type gives a different feeling to the words “The Puddle Jumpers”?
(Fonts used here are CK Diva and Casual)

Picture 2

To reveal the Character palette click on the little icon where the arrow points – it is full of amazing options about which I’ll tell you a little, but I do urge you to read and experiment as there is so much you can do!

Picture 3

Font Family, Font Style (not available on all fonts) and font size are very self explanatory.

Kerning: Refers to the space between two characters. A nice quick way to do this is to click on the type tool, then click your cursor between the two characters, and holding down your alt. key use the left and right arrows of your keyboard (left brings closer, right, widens the space)

Tracking is very similar to kerning but affect the whole word, or selected letters. Type a word of text and click on the down facing arrow, the default is zero, select either a minus value, or a plus one and you will see what I mean. This is useful to create effects like this:

Picture 4

If I had typed the text and left it to its own devices so to speak, I could never have got the top line to be the same length as the lower one – I did it by creasing the tracking in line one, and slightly decreasing it in Line 2.
Vertical and Horizontal Scale – go to either of these two options and change the numeric value – you will see how you can change to proportions of the letters, make them short and squat or tall and thin - just thinking – this would be a great option for a layout showing the before and after of your latest diet ?

To see what baseline shift does – type a line of text and highlight one character, alter the value of the baseline shift to say, 25 – what happen? The letter moves up from the original base line……….. if you do a lot of mathematical notations this will be very useful to you ? however, most scrapbookers would use it to create cool effect like the word “jumpers” in Picture 1. If you did not use this handy option, you would need to put each character on a separate layer which gets bulky and difficult to handle. Think of the fan ways you could us this in layout titles – taller, going up and up in steps, fly a kite would also be good, down in the dumps……………… unleash your creativity!

Now near the bottom, there is a line of options, starting with faux bold on the left – each of them is really easy to use, have some text on your screen and click on each, one by one and see what each does…………….. and then, think how this could be useful to you?

Right at the bottom you can click the language option of your choice – this will affect the spell check and then bottom right is the anti-aliasing button – there are several different options each affecting the type in different ways – zoom in a bit, click on each option and see what it does.

One tip, when your are finished playing, go back and reset each option, otherwise next time you want to do some journaling you will wonder why your type tool is behaving so very strangely ? - yes, it will remain the way you have left it even if you close Photoshop and reopen!

Have fun with your type tool, you will be amazed at the difference you can make with a few easy clicks!