Subtitles of the Movie

What you can do with type is of course add styles to it. You can add a drop shadow to it, you can do all kinds of cool things to type. But there are some functions that require the type to be turned into pixels, so we have to rasterize it. Let me give you an example, as you see here I have my regular type and the T tells me this is live editable text so I can always double click on the T and I can change the color and I can do whatever I like to the text. I can change the font, but you'll notice something very interesting here. What if I try to put a gradient in this text. Now I'm gonna put my mouse into the layer and look at this, I get this no symbol. It's telling me I can't do it because this is live type, I have to turn it into pixels first. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my layer menu. I'm gonna go on down to where it says rasterize and then I'm gonna slide on over to type. This turns the type into pixels. It snatches it away from the realm of editable, so we can't change any of the letters anymore, they are no longer fonts. They are, they are just pixels. So what we can do is we can now add a gradient. And to do this let me show you a little trick here, I'm going to lock this layer as far as the transparent pixels. What that tells the layer is to ignore everything that is transparent. So I'm gonna hide this background layer, just to show you. You can see the font or the text rather and you see behind it this little checkerboard, this is the area that Photoshop is going to preserve. It's gonna leave that alone. So when we apply our affect on this layer it's gonna apply only in the text. So I can use a gradient and I can just move my mouse like so and now I can fill it in with the gradient. How is cool is that? Once again you can't do this unless the text is actually broken down. Another benefit to rasterizing the text is that, well if your working on a file and a client needs to work with type and doesn't really need to change the font anymore. He is happy with what you have here but you know you want to send him the layered file. He won't be able to use the same fonts if he doesn't have those fonts on his computer system, so by rasterizing it you give him the artwork that he can work with without having to worry about having that font. So that's the other advantage. So once again when you want to rasterize your text, go to the layer menu choose the rasterize option and then go to type and then your text will be broken into pixels.