Color

• In all the Creative Suite 5 programs, but especially in Photoshop, one of the most robust ways to perform effects on text is through color. Each program's font menu, pane or panel lets you choose the color for your text, but in Photoshop, you can apply techniques such as overlays, patterns and glows. Through Photoshop's "Color Picker," you can also choose very specific colors for text, such as PANTONE codes, select a color already in the image and apply it to the text or make letters into a gradient rainbow.
  
  

Animation

• Text in Flash is hardly the same as text you'd find in a word processing program. Instead, letters, numbers and characters get animated. With Flash's proprietary coding language called ActionScript, text effects include bouncing around the screen, dropping from one corner to the next, swirling back and forth or backward, disappearing and more. These effects are created through Flash's "tweening" process.
  
  

Links

• Two of the Creative Suite programs offer you the ability to turn text into far more than just flat characters on a screen. With a little coding, text becomes alive, serving as hyperlinks. In Dreamweaver, use linked text to alert a Web surfer that if he clicks it, he can be taken somewhere else. Linking text in Dreamweaver causes a secondary effect, turning the text a different color and applying an underline. In Flash, linked text can serve in multiple ways. Link one keyframe to the next or one part of a scene to another.
  
  

Breaking Up

• In most software programs, when you type text, it becomes a linear left-to-right row on the page, sometimes wrapping into a paragraph when required. Through CS5, you've got multiple opportunities to break up that block. In Flash, it's the "Break Apart" command. Flash auto-senses each individual letter and places it in a box of its own. You then have the ability to move the letters, nudging them up and down, diagonally or wherever you like on the page. While the other Creative Suite tools don't have such a quick effect, you can do something similar. In Photoshop, create a layer through the "Layers" palette for each letter, then use the "Move" tool to position the letter as desired, including the ability to rotate, distort and warp the characters.