Photoshop’s “Convert To Outlines” Command

Unlike InDesign and Illustrator, Photoshop does not have a “Convert To Outlines” command for outlining type in production situations…or does it?

More than one might expect, I often find myself creating my layouts in Photoshop rather than InDesign. Image-centric layouts, with only a few lines of type, are often more easily produced right in Photoshop, where the images will be coming from anyway. But there’s always the problem of getting the layout ready for the printer because Photoshop is way behind when it comes to packaging fonts and preflighting, all very important things when it comes to print production. InDesign makes it easy, but Photoshop wasn’t really designed for this even though it has most tools needed for print layout.

“Convert To Outlines” is the command available in InDesign and Illustrator that creates vector art out of type. Unfortunately, not only does Photoshop fail to package fonts, but there’s no Convert To Outlines command per se. However, there is a command that does practically the same thing:

Layer –> Type –> Convert to Shape

This command converts a type layer into a shape layer, which is a layer filled with a single color and masked by a path based on the pre-existing type. With this command, you can “convert to outlines” easily.

I often like to duplicate my type layers, turn off their visibility and stow them somewhere in the file so I can return to them if there’s changes to the type layers.