Photoshop Text

[Piscivorous]

Is each text line its own layer? As I type in text it forms its own layer. Is this the way of it in Photoshop?

I'm using CS4.

[tilt]

if you only click you get one line - if you click and drag you make a text box where you can write and edit the size of later

[Piscivorous]

Sorry, I think I need to be more clear. I have a huge map I'm working on in CS4. Once the terrain has been created, I'll need to start naming all of the terrain features, nations, cities, etc. If I end up with 1200 place names, will I end up with 1200 layers of place names?

[Djekspek]

As far as I know I'm afraid so.... smart grouping of the layers and the use of (font) styles is sort of a must for these amounts of labels. When I need many labels, I group them per region and per type (e.g city, mountain, forest), so I can switch visibility on/off per group and apply style-changes per group. This way performance can be kept under control. But if there's better options I'd be curious as well! cheers, DJ

[Piscivorous]

I think I'm going to need a bigger computer.

[atpollard]

Who doesn't?

[Revock]

I use Gimp but i assume it would be the same in PS, what i do is use a single transparent layer for text, or mountains or whatever, as i get an element i'm happy with i merge it down onto that single transparent layer,

since it's transparent if i rectangle select and cut it out later i haven't messed up the terrain or whatever other layer below. *shrug* seems simple enough to then redo that single element and then remerge it down on whichever element layer its meant for.

Of course I have made the mistake of merging down a mountain or whatever i later regretted and being unable to get rid of it without messing something good up, organization and backups are the key. I have to beat that into my brain.

I didn't do it on my website and now i have to redo the site subtitle since the shadow is missing around one element of it. But, yeah along the lines of what Djekspek said, a layer for countries, rivers, cities or whatever.

[ravells]

I do all my text labelling in vector. You have all your text on as many layers as you like and it's much easier to manipulate the text too. Best of all, the text is easy to find, you don't have to hunt through a zillion layers. So if you have AI then just use that for labelling or if not, you can use something like Inkscape.

[Revock]

Ravells so do you keep two files for each project? As in I would make one for terrain work in Gimp and one for all labeling in Inkscape? The nuts and bolts of how you experienced guys do things interests me, i.e. workflow and planning. what other elements of the finished map do you keep separate? I've tried to build a folder of .XCF's for various mapping elements like hills, mountains, lakes and the like that i can alter for the particular project and then copy visible and paste into the current map so I'm not redoing everything each map.

[Djekspek]

yeah finding the right label can be hard in PS. I always enable the select-on-click option in PS when labelling, so I can select the labels by clicking (no need to browse through all those layers). To create labels, I use ctrl+click+drag to copy an existing one (make sure it is in the same group or else copy the selected new label to the correct group), and then change the text of label. cheers, DJ