You don't think of Adobe Photoshop as a typographic program. In truth, fine typography is not its strong suit. But you can do some amazing things with type in Photoshop, thereby giving your text added punch -- and dimension, contortion, erosion, mummification, and so on.

Those are just a few of the effects you'll find in "Photoshop Type Effects Visual Encyclopedia," three chapters of which we've excerpted here. The book contains recipes for how to make ordinary letters into graphic elements.

In these excerpts learn how to use Photoshop to make text look like it's been written in the sky, outlined in neon, and stitched in leather. Better yet, take these techniques and experiment. You never know what you may come up with.

We've posted these excerpts as PDF files. To open them in your Web browser, click these links: "Is It a Bird?"; "Glow Baby Glow"; and "All Sewn Up." You can also download the PDF files to your machine for later viewing.

To open the PDFs, you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader. Get it here:

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