The default for Photoshop CS3 is auto hyphenation on, so if your text doesn’t break cleanly in the space you’ve defined, Photoshop will automatically break the offending word with a hyphen. Sure you can force return at the end of the line but that trick is for hackers. I’ll demonstrate the proper way to achieve this using the lyrics to the Bruce Springsteen classic “Growin’ Up.”

I assume you already have a Photoshop document open with some text that is hyphenated. To turn off hyphenation, select the Paragraph Panel in the Window drop down menu.

To turn off auto-hyphenation in all instances, click the small check box marked hyphenate. When the check box is empty, hyphenation is turned off. If the box is checked, then auto hyphenation is turned on.

To affect only specific paragraphs, select those paragraphs only.

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We’ll create a basic fade effect that will result in an image like this:

1. Open the original file.

2. If the image is on a background layer as illustrated below, you’ll need to double click the image in the layers panel to put it on its own layer that can be altered. When the new layer panel appears, click OK.

The layers panel should now look like this:

2. Add layer mask to your new layer. Click the “Mask” icon at the bottom of the palette.

3. A linked rectangle will appear on that layer.

4. Select the gradient tool from the tool palette

Make sure the toolbar previews the black-to-white or black-to-transparent gradient

5. Check your layers palette. Is the layer mask highlighted? If not, click on it.

6. Place your cursor at the point on the image that you want to be the lightest, click and drag to the point where you would like the fade to start.