While Photoshop has a ton of fonts to choose from, sometimes you have a specific font in mind or just really, really like fonts (guilty as charged**). So what do you do? You download a font into Photoshop. It’s easier than it sounds, I promise.
1. Find your font. dafont and similar free font websites are usually pretty good for basic jobs. Obviously the fonts that you pay for are a higher quality than free fonts, but it is an option to get your fonts for free.
Once you decide on a font, you can test it out using the custom preview button. Simply type in whatever you would like into the field, and it will show you how it will look in that font. It’s a great time saver, since you don’t want to go through the trouble of installing it only to find that it doesn’t work for the job you had in mind.
2. Download the font. I’m downloading the Windows version using Google Chrome. Once the file is downloaded double click and extract it to the location of your choice. Just make sure you can find it again. I’ve decided to extract it to my desktop.
Open the font folder, and there will be a file inside. This website is awesome and does the installing for you, so just right click on this file and then choose install from the menu.
If the website you are using doesn’t install it for you, simply drag and drop the file into C:\ -> Windows -> Fonts.
Then you can double-check to make sure the file is installed correctly. Go to C:\ -> Windows -> Fonts and we can see that it’s in the correct folder.
3. Use Your Font. This is the easy part, just open up Photoshop and it will be listed with all the other fonts. Just select your font and use it like any other Photoshop font.
**I love me a great hand-drawn or calligraphy font. I fell out of love with them for a few years because I had a graphic design teacher who yelled at me and criticized my font choice (which was a hand-drawn font) for being childish and immature. True story. Thankfully I’ve gotten over that and decided that there’s no accounting for personal taste.
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