It’s Photoshop Down & Dirty Tricks Friday. You’re gonna dig this!
OK, you’ve gotta try this one, even if you don’t do type effects a lot, because it unlocks a little known Photoshop CC feature that is just awesome! Here goes:
STEP ONE: Start by choosing an Open Type font (here I’m using the Open Type font Bickham Script Pro, but you can use other Open Type fonts (look for the “O” symbol in front of the font’s name in the Font pop-down menu). So why the Open type fonts? Because they have really cool hidden stuff (more on that in the next stuff). For now, just type Pizzeria
STEP TWO: To find the cool hidden stuff, go under the Type menu, under Panels, and choose Glyphs Panel (as shown here).
Above: Here’s what the panel looks like — it shows you all the font’s symbols, special characters, and specially-designed beautiful extra versions of your capital letters and lower case letters, and you can use these to create instant logos that really have a unique look.
Above: At the top of the panel is a list of all the different sets of characters that come with this particular font (and you can see there’s a bunch of ’em, like a whole set for Currency symbols, like the British Pound, The Euro, The Japanese Zen, etc.). But we’re going to use a special set of capital letters.
STEP THREE: Highlight the “P” in Pizzeria (as shown here) and then choose Swash from the pop-up list of characters in the Glyphs panel (as seen here). You can see a preview of the some of the beautifully-designed alternate capital letters you can use. Now, take a look at the capital “P” that is the default “P”. It’s “OK” but it could be fantastic by choosing some of these Swash version (TIP: there’s a slider at the bottom of the panel that lets you choose the size of the thumbnail previews).
STEP FOUR: Scroll down alphabetically to the letter “P” and double-click on the preview and it replaces your boring old capital P with the much fancier P you see here. Admittedly, I’m not crazy about this particular fancy “P” but luckily, it’s not are only choice.
STEP FIVE: There’s another set of beautiful capital letters that take things up a notch. Highlight that capital P again; then from the pop-up menu at the top of the Glyphs panel, choose Stylistic Alternates; scroll down alphabetically to the letter “P” and double-click on the “P” there to get the gorgeous “P” you see here. How about that bad boy? Beautiful, right? Oh, but there’s more — let’s make the last letter in Pizzeria — the boring “a” into a more interesting “a.”
STEP SIX: Highlight that ‘a’ at the end, and then scroll up to the Stylistic Alternate “a” and double-click on it. Look at that nice a now! (stop snickering). ;-)
STEP SEVEN: We’re not done (still more cool stuff we haven’t uncovered), but let’s add a 2nd line of text; change your font to Trajan Pro (this font comes with Photoshop, too!) and type in the word Italiano. Change the color of Italiano to red; change the color of Pizzeria to green (highlight the text and choose the new color from the color swatch up in the Option bar at the top of the screen). OK, time for more fun stuff.
STEP EIGHT: One of my favorite features of Open Type fonts is that many of them has a set of decorative ornaments, and Bickham Script Pro is no exception — choose Ornaments from the Glyphs panel’s pop-up menu; click the Type tool somewhere away from where your other text is located; then double-click on any one of the ornaments and it appears on screen. Here I clicked on a nice ornamental “swooshy thing” and then I dragged it up under the letter “P” like you see here. I clicked on a few different ones until I came up with this one that I thought fit pretty well, but there were LOTS of choices of different styles and shapes. OK, we’re almost done.
STEP NINE: You’re about to learn a very handy selection trick, but to make a selection of just part of a Type layer, you have to convert it from a Type layer to a regular ol’ pixel layer. You do that by Right-clicking on the layer in the Layers panel and from the pop-up menu that appears, choose Rasterize Type (as shown here). Now, you could grab the Eraser tool and just start erasing any part of that word Pizzeria you’d like (but don’t do that, because you’d miss the really handy selection tip I’m about to share.
STEP 10: We’re going to make the dots in the dotted “i’s” red. Get the Rectangular Marquee tool; drag a selection around the dot over one of the eyes (as shown here).
STEP 11: Switch to the Move tool; then press the Up Arrow key on your keyboard once, and then press the Down Arrow key once. This snaps the selection to the dot (as seen here). This is such a handy tip because it picks up every pixel (it does a much better job than the magic wand would have done. In fact, this technique will even pick up stuff like soft drop shadows behind layers, and basically anything and everything in that area. It works like a charm!) Now; set Red as your Foreground color then press Option-Delete (Windows: Alt-Backspace) to fill the dot with red like you see above.
STEP 12: Here’s the finished logo with the red-dotted “i’s”
Hope you found that helpful. :)
-Scott
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