Photoshop can guess your font using Match Fonts

Hi there, this video is all about taking graphics that have fonts, that are just kind of smashed into it that we can't figure out. We don't know what fonts they are, it's not editable. Photoshop has an amazing feature called Match Font. We have some success, this one here I feel like we got pretty good, matches that word. Same with Smart here. We get this one pretty good, maybe a slightly different weight is needed. It goes pretty good for this one, it goes horribly wrong for this one. If you do know what that font is let me know in the comments. And it goes really well with this one, surprisingly. Somehow it knows magically what font that is. Let's go check that out now in Adobe Photoshop. 

To get started, in '08 Typography', open up 'Match Font 1', '2', '3', '4', '5'. So we're going to work our way through easy to hard, and talk about the different instances. Often I'm working through, say a site, like Behance, looking for ideas, inspiration, and I'm like, "Oh, I like this font here." So I clicked on it, loaded it, brought it into here. I know it's not editable type, so how am I going to figure it out? Photoshop's fancy Match Font. So just took a screenshot, and we've got it here in Photoshop. So for this to work we need to grab the 'Selection Tool'. The 'Rectangle Marquee Tool', in particular. And it doesn't like it when you group lots of lines. So I'm going to 'Deselect' that. I'm going to grab the one that has the most characters on it, this one here. Then I'm going to go to 'Type', and go to this one that says 'Match Font'. Kick back, relax, depending on how fast your internet is, mine, I might have to, no, fast, didn't even have to speed it up. 

And what it does is it goes and checks two things, it checks your computer, so it looks for things that are already on your computer. It also goes and checks Typekit to say, "Hey, I might have this font on here as well." And what I'm looking for is trying to figure out which one it is. The only trouble is, this sample here can't be edited yet. That would be a great little trick. If I could type in 'Assas', and I could kind of see this, because I'm dealing with the A and the S. The 'S' I can match, it's probably this one. I'll probably have to go through and download a bunch of them. So it's not on my computer because these don't match, but these are available on Typekit, and all I have to do is decide on this one here. Goes off and starts syncing. Orbitron Bold, I'm going to see if this works. 'Assassin'. I totally didn't make this beforehand to make it all streamlined. Maybe I should have. Orbito, there it is there. It might be the wrong weight. Maybe. Let's scale it down. It's the wrong weight but I think it's the exact right font.

 
So I think I picked Orbito, what did I pick? Orbitron Bold I'm going to have to go through the Typekit, find Orbitron, and download all the different weights to try and match it up. Now when this first came out, and I first did my tutorials, it worked like 30% of the time. Somehow Adobe have got better at it, and have got more fonts in their Typekit library, So it seems to work like, I'd say, 70% of the time, just picks the font. Let's look at a few tricks. So let's go to 'Match Font', and let's say this one here, same thing, I want to give props to the two people I appropriated fonts from. This guy's Chinese, and I don't know how to pronounce his name. That's him, the other one is the Black Panther mock-up. Andriy Bata. I'd probably run that one too. Anyway, I like the design, I want the font, how do I figure it out? Back in here, but we're going to do a little trick. 

What I'm going to do is grab the 'Type Tool', and just type out the word 'Smart'. Get it to roughly the right size, somewhere in there. Why? Because there's a little trick you can do, remember the Rectangle Marquee Tool is the thing to tell Photoshop to check there, but you don't actually have to be on the layer, you're checking, it will look through all of the layers. You got hundreds of them, it will just check what it sees, but if I have my layer selected here for type, we can do this trick to probably just show you, let's go to 'Match Font'. It does its font magic. If you are like me with a slow internet connection, this thing keeps updating. Eventually it will stop, so fonts available. And what I'm looking for is, watch this, this is on my computer, I can click on it. You can see there. Oh, so close. 

It's easier to sample this and work, so you can go just kind of click on these and just work your way through. The trouble with these ones is that you've got to download each of these. That's okay, it's easier than guessing, I might just say, that's close enough, you can see the M is very different. Comes down with a baseline on this version, doesn't for here. I might now jump into Typekit and just check Raleway to see if there is like different versions, maybe there's a Glyph version of the M that gets used. Maybe there's a display version. Or I just click on all of these and just see which one might work. That guy looks like it, let's do it. I should practice these things beforehand. I like the raw real world problems and things we might get. Let's click 'OK'. See if it does it, Proxima Nova. Extra condensed. Where's Proxima Nova? Oh, what do you reckon? 

I think we might have done it but maybe not the Extra Bold version. Let's see how we look. There's no other than Extra Bold so I'm going to have to go to Typekit now, and I bet you, if I search for Proxima Nova, there will be a bunch of weights that I could use. And I bet I would find it, I reckon it is, anyway. So just have your text on a Type Layer, and just use your Rectangle Marquee Tool to select the font. Let's look at some harder ones, let's look at this one here. So real world photograph. For this to work it needs to be straight. You could just double click the background, 'Command T' to rotate, just kind of get it close. And what we might do is use our trick that we used earlier. Remember the Perspective Crop? So hold down the 'Crop Tool', grab 'Perspective Crop', This is pretty easy because it's got four corners, that I can easily work out the edges, click 'Return'. 

I think the Perspective is a little bit wrong as if it's squished wide. Let's see how it works anyway. So 'Marquee Tool', drag a box around it, and go to 'Type'. We're going to do it, I'd probably clean out the little dot using the Spot Healing Brush, but I bet you it's going to work, this one I tested. 'Type', 'Match Font'. This bit here maybe need some sharpening, we're just going to see how well it does. You can see it's giving me some good examples. What I should do as well is, just do my little trick with the layer. Let's not double back now, let's go forward, and deal with this one. This one here is like, how close is this going to get. Is it even a font? Probably is, maybe. Let's give it a test, I'm going to double click the background. I am going to use a different technique to line it up. So I'm going to use 'Command R', or 'Ctrl R' on a PC. Just opens up my rulers, and I can drag one. Just drag from the center of the ruler down. I'll drag it roughly about there. 

With the layer selected, 'Command T' to rotate, we can go to 'Edit', 'Transform', 'Rotate'. I'm just trying to get it kind of close to the baseline. Hit 'Return'. Now my Rectangle Marquee Tool. We're going to confuse it a little bit, with all this extra stuff in the background, but let's give it a whirl, let's go to 'Type', let's go to 'Match Font'. Sometimes it comes up with a little error up here saying, no chance, or, you need to refine your selection a bit better. So far, hasn't done well. Let's have a little look, no, let's cancel it, and let's do what they said. I'm going to copy and paste this on to its own layer, we're doing some hacking, because all I really want to know is the font, right? 

So what I will do is, I'm going to use the 'Eraser Tool'. Get rid of anything I don't need. I'm going to use Levels, just to kind of see if I can get rid of some of the wood there. Really accentuate that type. Let's see how that goes, maybe it needs a white background. 'D' key to reset it back to default black and white. 'X' to bring the white to the front, and hold down 'Option-Backspace'. I'm getting crazy with the shortcuts though. So with it selected, come with me, let's do Match Font. I'll fast forward this along. So fast forwarded it because it didn't get it. Got it in a previous example, so I'm just going to kind of work through it again. 

I'm just picking this because maybe these are clearer letters than this. I'll give it one more go. We'll speed it up again, I'll see you at the end, we'll see how it works. We'll try this side. Here we are again, not working. I really didn't feel like I got a better result last time, but I didn't record that, it was just a practice. What I would do now is go to a site called whatthefont, and I would try it in there. Do I think it's better, I don't do it enough to compare them perfectly, but know that there is another service called whatthefont, great name, I'd save this as a JPEG and try it in there. 

Let's go to the last one, that's super hard. Hopefully this one's going to-- I feel a bit deflated after the last one. Let's select this one, and let's go to 'Type', 'Match Font'. I'll speed it up. Now I'm feeling better about it. It is, like there's no way to know what that font is. It's a live action, light on a wall. You can see, it's come back with some, maybe not perfect. I'm going to have to work my way through and try and work out which one it is, but I feel like it could be one of these, maybe different weight. You can see, maybe this one here. Ah, pretty close. So we end on a high with Matching Fonts. If you were really desperate you might go through and remove the background, and just kind of draw around a little bit. You can use the Pin Tool to kind of redraw it and see how it goes, but know that that feature is there, pretty cool. That is going to be the end though. Let's get into the next video.