Need to adjust Tracking in Photoshop
When working on text in Adobe Photoshop, you may need to adjust the intervals between your letters to make them either tight or loose. How to Adjust Tracking in Photoshop?
By adjusting the horizontal spacing (called tracking) between the letters in your text, you can upgrade the readability of your text, or change it to be more visually aesthetic.
A great example of this would be bold headings on a flyer or social media graphic where you want the letters to spread further separate for both looks and readability.
How to Adjust Tracking in Photoshop
How to do it is here:
- Open your project file in Photoshop
- Choose or create the text you want to adjust the space of
- Select the Character Panel Window >> Character
- Adjust the intervals of your text by changing the point value in the tracking box (in the “VA” icon) — the value is too high, the more the intervals
What is Tracking?
Tracking is a term mostly used to describe the space between letters in a line of text. Tracking affects the space between both(letters or words) the individual letters as well as the spacing between whole words.
As advertised in the above image, when you increase the distance between two or more letters the total length of the word and sentence increases as well.
Pro-tip: When work on graphics designing in Photoshop, Must utilizing different tracking values in the same project can make your graphic more dynamic and entertaining.
How to use Tracking?
It is essential to use tracking when creating headlines and paragraphs in Photoshop.
For Headlines:
- Highlight your written headline by selecting the Type Tool (T) or Double Clicking.
- Manually enter your value into the Tracking Box (VA icon)
- Rather, Select the “Down Arrow” next to the “Tracking Box” and increase spacing by increments of 10
For Paragraphs or Body text:
- Choose the body text by “Double Clicking” or Choosing the Type Tool (T)
- Manually or incrementally adjust the value in the “Tracking Box”
Streamlined Method:
If you want a streamlined method to adjust the tracking of your text visually,
follow these shortcuts;
- Choose the text you wish to adjust
- Hold that Option
- Choose the left or right “Arrow Keys” until you find the right spacing
Pro-tip: If you want to create more detailed adjustments using this shortcut method, Click “Command+K”, Choose Units & Increments, and lower the value to create more detailed Tracking adjustments.
Why we need use Tracking in Photoshop?:
One of the main reasons we mostly use Tracking in Photoshop is to improve the readability of text. Specially for bodies of text, a high volume of words in one location can quickly become too opaque and hard to read. By increasing the spacing the text becomes extra spaced out and easy to read.
Another reason, we use Tracking is to improve the style of ads and graphics. For example, a flyer that will be printed needs to have adequate spacing between the letters both so, it can be read from far away, as well as to looks better stylistically.
It is more important to always look at how different values of Tracking look in your project. Usually the missing piece to make a project look more professional and polished is Tracking.
Kerning vs Tracking:
Kerning is affecting the space between two letters exclusively, Tracking is affecting the spacing between letters and words.
Both Tracking and Kerning involve space. Kerning, however is mostly used for large text and titles to adjust the space between individual letters.
How to Kern;
- Highlight the two letters that you wish to adjust with the Type Tool (T)
- Hold that Option
- Select the left or right “Arrow Keys” until you find the right spacing
If you want to learn something more about the details of Tracking and Kerning, click here.
How to change or adjust Tracking;
Tracking can be changed at any point of your project. If you are doing briefly adjustments to the spacing, it may be helpful to reduce the tracking values. Rather, if you are working on a large-scale project and want to create more dramatic adjustments, you can raise the value making the spaces larger.
You can change Tracking to either Optic or Metric:
- Metrics is auto-tracking or kerning, fonts have preset spacing values that work better with their unique designs.
- Optical is spacing based on the size of the letters and works better when using multiple fonts.