Create stylish text layouts with Dynamic Text in Photoshop

Hey there, my name is Aaron Nace, and today I'm going to show you how to use the brand-new Dynamic Text Tool.

Now you can create text layouts that resize and reflow when the text bounding box is adjusted.

This is amazing.

Let's jump into Photoshop.

We're going to start off by defining our text area.

Go ahead and grab your Horizontal Type Tool located in your Toolbar.

We're going to be using our Font as Helvetica Neue, and our font Weight is going to be Regular and our Color is going to be black.

Let's go ahead and click and drag to define our text area, which we can see is automatically going to be filled with placeholder text.

I'm going to go ahead and paste in from my clipboard to say: "The Perfect Summer Starts Now."

Now I want to make this text a little bit more interesting.

And I could do this manually by selecting every single word and changing the font size and weight and layout or I could do this automatically by using the new Dynamic Text.

Let's go ahead and toggle the Dynamic Text icon.

It's located right here in our Contextual Task Bar, it looks like the Text icon with a lightning bolt.

And as soon as I click on this, you can see our type is immediately formatted.

Now, in my opinion, the most powerful part of Dynamic Text is that you can resize the bounding box, and it's going to change your text layout.

All you have to do is click right here on any one of your corners and change the shape of your Dynamic Text.

And as you do, your text will change to fit the bounding box.

You can also select specific words and change the font weight.

In this case, we're going to click and drag over "Summer" to select it.

Here in our Options window, let's go ahead and make that Bold.

And then "The Perfect", we're going to select that, make that Light.

And then "Summer Starts Now" we're going to go ahead and make that Light as well.

Let's hit that Checkbox to apply our transformation.

This looks great, but I want our text to be a little bit more visible, so we're going to create a background.

Here in our Layers panel, be sure you click on your Background layer.

Then we're going to go over to our Rectangle Tool.

Here we go.

You can choose the color you'd like to fill with.

I'm going to choose my Color Picker here and actually go ahead and use my Eyedropper to sample from our subject's phone, and hit OK.

Up here at the top, we're going to choose our Stroke options, and I'm going to choose No Stroke, and then simply click and drag to create your rectangle.

Here on the very top, you're going to see an option for rounded corners.

Let's go ahead and click and drag there, add some rounded corners for a more refined look.

And last of all, we're going to lower the opacity so you can see through this background a little bit more.

Go ahead right to your Rectangle layer, and for your Opacity slider, simply click and drag to the left until you can see through it.

This is looking really great, but I want the font color to be a little bit lighter to help stand out even more.

So go ahead and click on your Dynamic Text layer, here in your Contextual Task Bar you can click on your color, and then I can either choose a color from my window, or simply use my Eyedropper to choose a color from my photograph and hit OK.

For the next step, I want to align the text and the background perfectly with each other.

It's really easy to do.

Simply hold Ctrl or Cmd and click on both layers you'd like to align.

Then we're going to go to our Move Tool and we're going to align this first horizontally and then vertically.

Now we're going to group both of those layers so we can move them at the same time.

For this, simply make sure both of the layers are selected and hit Ctrl or Cmd G.

Now let's show you one last trick.

I want this text box to appear behind my subject, so we're going to make sure we click here on our Background layer.

Let's go to our Object Selection Tool, and then here at the very top where it says Select Subject, just make sure you have Cloud-based selections for detailed results.

We're going to click on Select Subject, and this is automatically going to select our subject.

Let's go ahead and click on our Group where we have our type.

I'm going to hold Alt or Option and click on my Layer Mask icon here, and you can see automatically this appears behind our subject.

I can open up my group and Shift-click on these layers and move them at any time to reposition them perfectly within my photograph.

And if we want to create a vertical variation, it's incredibly easy to do.

Simply click here on your Rectangle, go to your Rectangle Tool and resize your rectangle.

There we go; let's hit Enter.

And then, go to your Type Tool, make sure you've clicked on your type, and then resize your type using the new Dynamic Type and you can see it's perfectly aligned.

Let's just make sure we Shift-click on both of those layers.

Go to our Move Tool to align them on the vertical centers, and then you're going to hold Ctrl or Cmd and move both layers at the same time.

And to adjust the scale of these layers, simply hold Ctrl or Cmd to select them both.

Hit Ctrl or Cmd T, and now you can change the scale to perfectly fit your image and look great for any composition.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

This fantastic new tool will make designing so much easier, and I can't wait to see what you do with it.