Highlighted text is a very popular style used in marketing materials especially on social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It’s a simple way to turn boring text into attention-grabbing headlines.
And although these text styles are simple, it takes a lot of steps to create them in Photoshop. For example, if you want to highlight a paragraph of text like this. You have to draw a box for every line of text. You also have to be precise otherwise the results will look messy.
But now with these Photoshop actions, you can easily create this highlighted text in just one click. You can also create a ribbon, pill-shaped button, underline with any color you want, and more. These are the very first Photoshop actions that can do this and it’s such an easy way to make any text look more interesting. If you’re interested, keep watching and I’ll show you how it works.
Free Download
This version is completely free and includes the fluid width action.
- Underline
- Box
- Fluid Width
- Raster Layers
- Fully Editable Layers
Purchase Text Highlighter Pro
Text Highlighter Pro gives you more highlighting styles that are vector shapes & high-res smart objects. It also includes a “Play All Effects” action.
- “Play All Effects” action
- Underline
- Strikethrough
- Interlaced
- Box
- Underlined Box
- Pill
- Arrow Left
- Arrow Right
- Ribbon
- Ribbon Left
- Ribbon Right
- Fluid Box
- Fluid Box (Small Text)
- Highlights are Vector Shapes/High-Res Smart Objects
Text Highlighter Pro can be purchased at SparkleStock or Creative Market. Thank you for supporting me. It helps tremendously and I appreciate your support!
Loading the Actions
After downloading the file, you can load the actions simply by doubleclicking on the ATN file. It’ll then show up in Photoshop inside the Actions panel. If you don’t see the Actions panel, you can open it by going to Window > Actions.
By the way, these actions are only compatible with Photoshop CC. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it compatible with Photoshop Elements or older versions of Photoshop because these actions are really pushing the boundaries of what you can do with a Photoshop action.
Using Text Highlighter
To use the actions, start by selecting a text layer and then go into the Actions panel and select an action that you want to play. Hit the play button on the bottom of the panel and it’ll render the effect.
The free version has three styles. One of the styles is the Fluid Box style which is a style that I showed in one of my previous video tutorials. Except now you can do it in one click instead of a bunch of steps. If you get any message about selections, you can checkmark the never show again option and click OK. This is just a trick that the Photoshop action does to detect the height of your text. By the way, the actions will not change your text size. It also won’t rasterize your text layer. Your text layer will stay the same as it was before.
Pro Version
If you upgrade to the pro version (and thank you for your support by the way), you get more styles and features. Because there’s a lot more styles, playing them each one-by-one will take a lot of time. So to make things even easier, you can select the Play all effects action which will render all the effects in one go.
Before you play the action, make sure that the action is collapsed which you can do by clicking on this arrow here. For some reason, Photoshop plays the action faster when the actions are collapsed.
Another way is to switch to button mode which you can do by going to the Actions panel menu and selecting Button mode.
Anyways, let’s play the action and let it run. Once it’s done playing, you can pick an effect from the History panel. This saves you a lot of time compared to playing the actions one-by-one and it’ll show up immediately because all the styles are prerendered.
The text styles are vector shapes with an exception for the pill style which is a high-res smart object that you can scale up to 4 times the size without any loss in quality. And the reason for this is because Photoshop isn’t great at converting round shapes into vector paths. So for better quality, we made it a high-res Smart Object.
For the Fluid Box style, there’s two versions for it. One is for small text up to 100 pixels in height. This action can sometimes give you better results and help reduce wavy edges you might get depending on your font. The Fluid Box actions works best with capitalized text. If you use lowercase letters or certain punctuation marks, you might get wavy edges. I also recommend trying out the Fluid Box style with doublespaced letters. You can do this in the Characters panel and set the leading to around double of what your font size is.
Examples
Here are some examples of what you can create with these Photoshop actions.
