How to Use Dynamic Text in Photoshop (New 2025 Feature!)

Hello, my name is Rickard, and in this short tutorial, I'm gonna show you how to use the new dynamic text tool in Photoshop. In the latest release of Photoshop, Adobe added a new feature called dynamic text, and what I wanna do in this short tutorial is show you how to use it, what are the options, and what you can do with it. Let's dive into Photoshop. All right, I'm gonna go to open here, and I'm just gonna grab this Will Turner file. I downloaded this from Unsplash, and I'm gonna go ahead and crop it with my crop tool. I'm gonna set this to four by five, and then I just wanna move this down so that I'm mostly using the water part of this image. Okay, I'm gonna do command zero to fit this in my screen, and now I wanna go to the type tool. Now, I'm using a font here from Google called Monti Satini Pro, and it's a really nice font for this kind of typographic design, but really, what font you use does not matter. What we're gonna do here is just kind of start up here and click and drag. That's gonna create a text box, and it's gonna fill it with some Greek text, some lorem ipsum, and with the normal type tool, as I change the size of my type box, Photoshop is going to fit this type inside the type box, so if I start to move my right margin here closer in, you can see it's breaking the lines differently. As I move it out, it puts more words on those lines, and if I move this up and make it smaller than the text that it contains, you get this big plus symbol, meaning that this text box has more text in it that's actually than what it's showing. So that's the normal type tool, and now we're gonna dive into what is the dynamic type tool. Now, before I do that, I'm gonna put my own type in here, so I'm just gonna do Command-A to select all the type, and then Command-V. This is just a quote I made up for this tutorial. In creativity, comma, it's the road less traveled that leads to something truly original. All right, and what we're gonna do is use this quote and turn it into dynamic text. So in order to turn this into dynamic text, I have three options. I can go to Type, Convert to Dynamic Text. I can also right-mouse click on my text layer and go down here, Convert to Dynamic Text, or the simplest way is to go up here and turn it into dynamic text. Also, in your contextual taskbar, you have that dynamic text icon, which is that T with the thunderbolt next to it. Now, as soon as I do that, you can see what it's done. It's basically taken all of these words and made them fit from the top of my text box to the bottom of my text box. Now, I mention that specifically because you'll notice that there's a gap here between the text box that I created and the right margin of this text. And as I resize this, you'll notice that it starts to break lines differently, but it kinda jumps between what it's able to do within the confines of the word. So the more text you put in here, the more it's gonna be able to conform. So if I took this, for example, I'm gonna do Command-A, Command-C to copy it, and then I'm gonna paste it twice so that I have twice as much text. And now you can see it has more ability to adjust both to your left margin and your top-bottom margin, depending on the resize. But as it's doing this, what it's doing is it's keeping your left and your right sides exactly lined up by changing the font size of your various lines of text. So here, as I make this bigger, you can see it's making all the words bigger because I'm pulling this kinda diagonally. But if I just move it to the left, you can see it's now adding more lines, making certain words bigger, smaller, and so forth. Similarly, if I move this up, you can see it kind of triggers to a point and then jumps as it figures out what other words it can put on various lines. So it's doing a lot of work in the background, but just realize your kind of top and bottom lines are probably the ones that most are influenced by this. And you can see even as I go like this and let it go, it swings back, whereas on the right side, it also does that. But on the right side, you have this kind of weird margin. I wish they had changed this so that both of them spring back to the shape, but that's the way the tool works as it exists right now. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and do Command A and do Command V, so I just have my original quote in here. A few other things you should note here is once you're moving this, if you want to transform, you can hold down the Command key and that'll let you transform the actual size of your text. If you hold down Shift, it does it proportionately. If you don't hold down Shift, you're doing it non-proportionally, which with type, you never wanna do that. So just make sure you're holding Shift there. If you add option to the mix, what it's gonna do is do it from the center, right? So here, if I'm adding Command, then Shift, and then Option or Alt will do it from your center. So it's kind of like a shortcut to do transform while you're in the midst of this. Otherwise, you can also commit this and then do Command T for regular transform, and that's gonna reverse your shift behavior, but otherwise, it allows you to do the same thing, make your whole thing bigger or smaller. Now, because Photoshop is doing this work in the background of setting the size of each line of text so that your left and right margins are perfectly aligned, and when I say perfectly aligned, I do mean perfectly aligned. If we zoom in here real close and bring out a guide and kind of place that on the left here, you'll notice that it is pixel perfect to that line. Not a single pixel goes over it, and each letter goes exactly to that guide. And similarly, on the right side over here, if I bring out a guide, place that exactly here on that right side, and let me bring it even closer to exactly that pixel, you'll see that this is to the pixel exactly at that spot. So that's what it's doing in the background, and because of that, there are certain things that Photoshop doesn't let you control when you're in dynamic text mode, and the first and most obvious one is the font size, right? So if I go here, select all this, and change my font size, you can see that it's having absolutely no effect here, and the reason for that is Photoshop is handling the size of the type in order to make your left and right margins fit exactly. The other thing that you cannot control here, and if I bring up my text palette, is the leading, which is the size between your type. So here, if I change this, you can see it's having no effect on my type. Now, things that you can control here still is you can control your tracking. So if you want more space between your letters, you can see that Photoshop does allow you to control that, and with it, it's using that to reinterpret which words it has to make bigger, which lines it has to make bigger, and so forth. So I'm gonna switch this back to zero. You can also control kerning, which is tracking at the letter level. So for example, if I wanna go in here and maybe bring the V a little closer to the A, I can do that, and as I'm doing it, you can see it is dynamically changing the rest of my type to stick to those left and right margins. Now, if you do wanna make certain words bigger or smaller, the way you have to control that is by changing where your line breaks are. So for example, if I wanna put road on its own line, what I'd have to do here is add a return before road and a return after road, and now you can see it's putting that on its own line, and maybe I wanna put original on its own line, so I'll add a return there, and maybe I want truly on its own line. So if I do that, now you can see it's making everything else quite a bit smaller in order to accommodate road, truly, and original all being on their own lines. Then I can go in here and make other small adjustments, and here I'm adjusting the tracking dynamically by holding down Option or Alt and using my left and right arrow keys. If you select a word and then use Option or Alt and the left and right arrow keys, you're gonna affect the tracking, meaning the space between all the letters. Okay, so now if you do want to affect the space between your individual lines here, there's a few additional options that have been added specifically for dynamic text. So if you go to your properties here, kinda scroll down, you'll see this dynamic text. This, by the way, is another way to activate or deactivate dynamic text. That's a toggle, but with it activated, you have two new controls, and this one allows you to adjust the amount of text between your lines. Now I noticed here, and this is something I noticed that seems to be a bug. As I'm changing this, it's each time I change it, it's making my type bigger. So just be aware of that. I'm gonna go ahead and make this smaller again. Okay, and then the other one is this one, which adjusts your line spacing, the space between your lines. So again, this one adjusts the space between your words. So if I change this to 150, you'll notice the space between these words got bigger. If I change it to minus 100, I get rid of all the space between the words. So now, or change that to zero, sorry. Now it has no space. 100 is the default, and I'm gonna leave it on that. Now that's using the information from the font itself to determine how much space should be between the words. And then this one adjusts the space between the lines. So 25 is the default. If I make it zero, our lines are gonna be touching, and you can make this bigger. So 50 will add even more space between the lines. You can also adjust individually the tracking of certain words. So let's say I want less travel to be on its own line. I could obviously do this, add another line break there, and that'll do the trick. I could also select both of these words and then just add a bunch of tracking here, and you can see what that's doing. It's not looking great, but it does allow you to do that. So now I have that on its own line because these words are so tracked out. Now, there's definitely scenarios where you'd wanna do that, but this is not one of them. So we'll go in here, open up our type palette again, and just change this back to zero. And maybe I do want less traveled on its own line. So I'm just gonna add a line break there. And then I can select all here as well. I'm gonna go back to my dynamic text and change this to 15. One thing I noticed is that this tool does not interactively show you. So if you select this, you would think, as in many other tools in Photoshop, that it would interactively show you your various levels, but unfortunately it does not do that. You have to commit it or let go in order to see what it looks like. So kind of have to put in the figure here, see if you like it, and then adjust it accordingly. But I like 15, I think that looks good. I'm gonna leave this at 100. And there you see all the features of that dynamic text and what you can do with it. So now that I've taught you all that, the last thing we're gonna do is just make this look a little nicer. I'm gonna do that with one simple little trick here, and this works really well with images that use a very complimentary color harmony. So in this case, if we look at cyan and blue colors here on our color wheel, the opposite of that is these kind of reddish orange tones, which is exactly what we have happening down here. So I'm gonna change the blend mode here to difference. And you can see now we're starting to get these colors from down here happening in our text. It's looking pretty good. The other thing I can do to make this look a little more integrated is double click on my layer and bring up my blend if options here. And over here under underlying layer, I'm gonna hold down the option, start moving this to the right a little bit. And you can see now we're getting some of the breakup of this water bleeding into our letters, which looks kind of cool. And then we can also maybe do that here with the water. So I'm gonna hold down option again, just kind of start moving this until we just get a little bit of texture in our top letters there. So there you go. And I'm pretty happy with that. Obviously we could do more, but I think that looks pretty cool. I can move it up maybe just a little, make sure original can be read there. So maybe something like this, and then I can maybe even do a little bit smaller. So we have some nice margin at the top there. So something like that. There you have it. Hopefully those are some tips, tricks, and techniques that you can use in your own projects. And if you enjoyed this tutorial, please subscribe to my channel, leave a like, turn on your notifications, share this video, or leave a comment on what are some other tutorials you'd like to see. All right. And if you're interested in learning Photoshop and getting tools for Photoshop, check out my site to nucli.com. I sell professional training and also professional tools for Photoshop. All right. Here's some other tutorials that you can check out and I'll see you next time.