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Welcome to my crash course on text in photoshop. This is a rather wide catagory, so I can't cover everything.
Part one: Aliasing and Anti-Aliasing.
This is a very important thing you should know about text. One type of text is meant for bitmap pixel fonts and text with transparent backgrounds for gifs, and the other is softer and meant for higher quality images.
Aliased text is jagged and has no blending whatsoever. It should only be used with a bitmap pixel font otherwise it looks incredibly ugly. Never ever mix a script font and the alias style. It will look ugly.
Anti Aliased text is smoother and has a better feel to it. The majority of the time, you should be using Anti Aliased text.
To switch back and forth between Anti Aliased text and Aliased text, select your text tool, and some settings will appear in the tool bar. For Aliased text, chose 'None' and for Aliased Text, chose any of the others. Any of the others will make the text smoother, but they all have slightly different effects.
Part two: Character spacing and text types
This part is for people who want to alter the spacing between letters in their text, or maybe make something italic, bold, or underlined.
All of these settings can be found in the character window, which you can get from the main toolbar by going to Window>>Character. Once you can see the window, it's pretty self-explanitory how you use it. You can also control your font properties, including font family, color, alias, and size from this window.
Part three: Blending options and text customizing
Now here comes the fun stuff. There is so much you can do with your text using the blending tools that coming with layer properties.
All of the above effects can be altered and customized to fit your needs. For example, you can set the dropshadow's distance to 0 and then fiddle with the spread and size to give it a burnt in look.
In order to use any of these effects, you will have to familiarize yourself with the 'Blending Options' window, where all the layer properties are kept. This effects can be used on almost every type of layer, but I use them mostly for text.
All the settings I put dots into are the ones I like to use the most. In order to view and change their properties, click on the text next to the check box and you'll be able to see all the settings you can tinker with. You can even combine effects.
Part four: Sideways text and curvy text
It took me forever to figure out how sideways and slanted text was done, but once I knew, it's actually really simple.
1) Go grab your text tool, click downwards and drag it until you have the area of text you want. Then, move your cursor to one of the corners on the selected text box, and you should see something that looks sort of like a fish hook or a bellybutton peircing. This is what lets you rotate your text. Click down, and drag it a bit until you have it where you want it. Adjust as necessary.
2) your text may not be in the place you want it to be, inwhich case you can move it with the Move tool, which is located next to the select tool on your toolbox
Part five: Warped and Curved text
I'm not too fond of this tool, but it can be useful sometimes. On your toolbar, you see a little T that looks like it's climbing a hill or something. Click on it, and it'll open up a new window, where you can adjust your text to make it twist and contort however you wish.
When you're done messing around the your text, remember to flatten the layers down.
Part six: Pixel/Bitmap text
1) Before attempting this, you should make sure you have a pixel font. If you don't have one and you download one while running PS, you will need to restart the program.
2) Once you have a font, go to your image and type some text in. Then Alias your text, and change the font size to something small. Almost all fonts look best with a text size of 8pt to 10pt. A few of them look best in uppercase. You should always rememeber to make sure that your image resolution is exactly 72, because even though miniscule like 72.009 can mess with your text.
3) After typing in your pixel text, stroke it using the Blending options. a stroke of 1 set to black usually works. Play around with it though, other colours work too.
