The Horizontal Type tool and its Tool panel compartment cousins enable you to enrich your creative projects in many ways, such as providing posters or book covers with eye-catching typography, or turning text into a key component of an illustration by inserting a photo into the fonts.

At first glance, the Type tool works in a similar way to word processing packages. As you move the mouse onto a Photoshop document a text cursor will appear. Click to place the cursor on a particular spot and start typing on your keyboard to add text to the document as a new layer. You can treat this text layer like any other Photoshop layer, and use the Move tool to fine-tune the position of the text in the design.