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Welcome to our first lesson, "Interacting with fonts and Photoshop," brought to you
by Printwand. Our goal here is to prepare this Photoshop file so that our commercial
printer, or anyone that we're handing our file off to can work with the document and
not have to worry about any potential font conflicts.
So in the first part of our lesson I'll show you how to go and get the fonts from where
they're stored on our computers and copy them so that we can hand them off. And in the second
part, we'll talk about how to convert the fonts in our Photoshop docs themselves so
that you don't need to include anything else when you're giving them to the printer.
So here I'll show you how to go and get your fonts if your using a Windows computer. First
head down to "Start," then go to "My Computer." Here, we're going to head to "Local Disk"
which is your (C:) drive, then we're going to go to "Windows" and then "Fonts." And so
here we can see all of the fonts that we have loaded on our computer. Lets go ahead and
create a new folder on our desktop so that we have a place we can copy our fonts to.
And we do this by right-clicking on our desktop, heading down to "New" and then heading over
to "Folder." And we're just going to name this "Fonts to Copy." We'll open up our new
folder that we have over here on our desktop, and we'll go ahead and drag to select, and
then windows will automatically paste this for you. And that's how you take care of copying
your fonts over in windows.
If you're using a Mac the process is a little different. Head to the "Macintosh HD," and
then the "Library" folder, and then the "Fonts" folder. And again, here we have all of the
system fonts loaded on our computer. So we're going to go ahead and create a new folder
on our desktop so that we have a place we can copy our fonts to. And you do this just
by right clicking on the desktop, selecting "New Folder", and then we can just rename
it whatever we want; in this case we'll just call it "Fonts." Ok, now that we've done that,
we'll go ahead and drag to select in the folder and then right click to "Copy." We'll go back
over to our desktop and open up the new folder that we have over here, and right click again
and go down to "Paste."
So that's how you can gather up the Fonts that you might be using in your Photoshop
document. To me, this is the preferred way to give a document to someone. That way, if
they don't have the font that you're using they can load it onto their computer and they
should be all set with your document. Another option would be to convert the text in your
document to an image.
So here we're now in Photoshop and we can see that we have a block of text that has
been typed into the document. And what we're going to do here is convert this text, which
is vector based, into a rasterized image. We'll get more into the differences between
raster and vector based artwork later on in our lesson, but for right now this is the
reasoning behind what we're doing.
So what you'll want to do is head up to your "Menu Bar," go to "Layer," head down to "Rasterize,"
and then over to "Type." And there you have it. Your type has been converted into an image.
Now you don't need to include your fonts with your Photoshop doc. The type has been placed
here as a piece of art.
But, here's a word of caution though. The problem with this method is that there is
no going back from it. Once you have rasterized your type it's no longer editable. So if you're
going to go down this route it's best to wait until the very end of your creative process.
Or, save a copy of your file with the type non-rasterized and then another with it rasterized
so that if you need to make changes you still won't have a problem doing so. So this concludes
our lesson about "Interacting with fonts and Photoshop," up next we're going to talk about
"The correct use of color."
Make sure to check back often to Printwand for more video lessons as well as other articles
to help you with your marketing and promotional needs.