Photoshop Text Tool - Digital Art and Design

In this tutorial, we will use the Photoshop^R Text tool to create four images that we will use as place holder images in a Flash^R template. For those of you who are interested in Flash, you might want to follow the rest of the tutorials listed at the bottom to create a Flash slideshow template. For the others, you will learn how to make a group of images that can be used as sample images in demos for your clients.

For our example demo, our client wants a simple Flash slideshow on the front page of his website. We will make four images to demonstrate our slideshow with the dimensions 580 px x 200 px. This is a good size for a slideshow placed above the fold on a website.

Open Photoshop CS5 and start a new image (File – New) that is 580 px by 200 px at 72 resolution.

We want these images to have all the same white background but the text will be different for each.
Still working in our first image, select the Text tool. Set the Foreground color to bea3c3 or any color of your choice.
Click in the center of the image with the Text tool and type "image 1". If we check the Options panel, we can see which Font Family and Style is set for the Text tool. In the example, we have the Myriad Pro font set to Regular style. Select the text and set the Font Size menu to 48. Also, let's center the text by selecting the Center Alignment icon. Click the Checkmark to set the text.
From the Menubar, click Layer – Flatten Image.
Save this image as image1.psd.

Now we can go back a few steps to unflatten the text layer.
From the History panel, click on the Type Tool layer to reverse the Flatten Image command.

To create our next image, we will change the font attributes and the text to "image 2".
Select the text and change it to "image 2". While still selected, set the Text Color box to 729273. We can also change the Font Family and Style from the menus in the Options panel. Have fun experimenting with different fonts and styles.
Click the Checkmark to set. Flatten the image and save as image2.psd.

Repeat these steps to create the orange (color ed620f) image 3 and blue (5473b3) image 4 images.

We now have four placeholder images for any project. Because the background is a solid white color and the text is centered, we can change the size of the placeholder images to our project's requirements as explained below.

In the Tools panel, set the Background color to white. From the Menubar, click Image – Canvas Size. Set the Width and Height as needed for your project.

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