The Sprague Lab

I will prove twice tonight that I’m completely arithmetically challenged. Is arithmetically even a word? In my world, it is. It’s a fancy way for saying …

I can’t count.

I’ve tried to count. Really. I’ve used up all my fingers and toes, and  I have the Windows calculator in my QuickBar for easy access. Math in general was my worst subject in school, and frankly, I’m fairly hopeless. So there you have it. Confession #647, for Photoshop Friday #.. ;)

I can’t remember what the last PSF # was, so we’re going to go blank with today’s tip… (proof #1 that I’m arithmetically challenged…)

Trying Out Fonts in Real-Time

I stumbled across this idea when I was searching for “the perfect font” for a project yesterday. Normally I use The Font Thing to manage and preview text in my various fonts, but I had the type all ready to go, and really wanted to see how it would look in the context of my project - the spacing, the weight of the letters, and so forth. Here’s how you can cycle through each and every one of your fonts in Photoshop (CS2 and Elements 5.0 were what I tested):

1. First, get your project started and then write your text in any font you like.

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2. With the Horizontal Type tool selected, target your type layer (Extra bonus cool tip: you can target MULTIPLE type layers simultaneously in PSE 4 and 5, as well as CS/CS2/CS3 and do this for all of them at once by holding down Ctrl and clicking on each layer in the Layers palette. Yes. That rocks).

3. **THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART** You need to target the menu you want to cycle through. In our case it’s the font selector. Pull down the font selector in the Options Bar at the top of your screen. You can re-select your current font or choose a different one. When you release the mouse with your font chosen, don’t touch anything else.

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4. Without touching any other tools or your mouse, hit the up and/or down arrow keys to cycle through your fonts, seeing them change in real-time, right on your project. Here, I hit the up arrow, and got the font just above Century Gothic in the listing.

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I know it’ll seem a bit cumbersome if you have, say, 1200 fonts installed, but it’s a very cool way of seeing things in real life, on your actual project. Sometimes the right font will make all the difference. I’ll even repost this post when the “project in question” comes to light in the first quarter of 2008. ;)