Photoshop 101: Edit Text Faster

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Editing text in Photoshop can be a nuisance on the fly, but I have a quick productivity tip to make your life a little easier. There is really no need to use the Type/Text Tool to edit a text layer unless you only need to highlight part of the text, or a small part of a large body of text. If you deal with a lot of text layers in Photoshop that are, for example, a bullet point or a short sentence, or small paragraph, this is the tip for you.

Photoshop 101: Edit Text Faster

To follow along, all you need to do is open any PSD you have lying around that has a bit of text in it. The reason for this tip is because you can quickly edit text without ever changing tools. Therefore you can edit a text layer, and when you're done, you still have the same tool you had before editing, with no need to change back to the (black arrow) for example. It's really fast and simple, here's how:

1. Double click on the “T” icon

Double click on the “T” icon, (not the layer itself) of the text layer you want to edit in your Layers palette.

Double click on the T icon

2. Bam! Your text is highlighted for editing!

Now your text will be highlighted and you can start typing to replace all of the text, OR I have another bonus tip below on what to do next.

Highlighted text

3. Position the cursor

Once you have your text highlighted, you can hit the left arrow to place the cursor in front of the text:

Position the cursor

or the right arrow to place the cursor behind all of your text:

Moving the cursor to the end

Advantages:

The nice thing about this feature/tip is that you don't have to go back and select another tool to keep working. You can simply click on a different layer and the tool you had selected before you edited your text will be reselected, or you can select any tool besides the text tool to keep your current layer selected and continue editing that same layer with a different tool. It may only save you 1-2 clicks, but over time, those clicks add up.