This tutorial came about because of my frustration at seeing a gazillion movies this year and the MAJORITY of them had title sequences where the kerning was horrible!

It amazes me that professionals get paid to design these things, and totally ignore something as basic as kerning. So you end up with a 'W' and an 'A' next to each other, with enough space between them to drive a car through.

While most people associate kerning tools with Illustrator, Quark or InDesign, Photoshop allows you to kern your text as well.

Here are some tips on kerning and how to do it in Photoshop.

First, what is Kerning?

Kerning is the space between pairs of letters.

Pairs like a 'V' and an 'A', or a 'W' and an 'A' or a 'T' and an 'A'.

Actually ANY pairs of letters can be kerned, but there are some pairs that cry out for kerning attention more than others.

Why the fuss about something like the space between pairs of letters?

Because bad kerning makes a word like "WAR" look like 2 distinct words.

Here we see a before and after kerning situation.

In the top word, there is way too much space between the 'W' and the 'A'.

In the bottom, the 'A' has been brought closer to the 'W', so much so, that the serif of the 'A' is actually under the top serif of the 'W'.

So how do we go about correcting the default Kerning that Photoshop throws at us?

First, place your cursor between the 'W' and the 'A'.

Then, holding the OPTION KEY (PC: ALT KEY) down, hit the LEFT ARROW key (some call it the LEFT CURSOR key) to bring them closer together.

If that's too slow for you, you can hold down COMMAND-OPTION-LEFT ARROW (PC: CONTROL-ALT-LEFT ARROW) which will make it move a greater amount.

As an alternative, you can open the Character Palette shown at left, and set the kerning in the Kerning Input Box, but that's too much trial and error for my tastes.

I almost always use the cursor method above.

Here's a similar situation due to the overhanging stem of the 'V'.

Photoshop defaults to keeping that 'A' as far away as possible, not wanting them to be social critters.

Here's another example. This one's a doosie, because the 1st 'A' is too far away from the first 'T', and the 2nd 'T' is too far away from the 1st 'A', and the final 'A' is too far away from the 2nd 'T'.

Rather than placing our cursor between each pair of letters and adjusting, you can highlight the entire word, and use the key combinations above to bring them closer together.

By the way, when you adjust space for an entire word or group of words (a line for example), it's called "tracking".

Here it is, after tracking the whole word.

The next time you're in a movie, in a restaurant, driving down the road, or looking at any printed material, see if you notice the kerning used, and ask yourself-"Could I do better than that?"

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