How to use emoji in photoshop

Emoji have become an integral part of our daily communication. Apple and Google have their own set of emoji and the list of emotions that you can express with them continue to expand. As of Windows 10, Microsoft has added an easier way to insert emoji in the form of an emoji panel. If you’e ever needed to insert a smiley face on a design project, you’ll be pleased to know you can insert emoji in Photoshop. In fact, you can insert them in any Adobe app that supports text input. Here’s how.

Insert Emoji In Photoshop

In order to insert emoji in Photoshop, you need to first activate the text input tool. Click the button with the T icon on it in the toolbox or, tap the T key to enter text input mode.

When the text input tool is active, you have the option to select the font and font size before you start typing text. These controls are located on the top customization bar. Click inside the font selection dropdown and type in ’emoji’. This will bring up the emoji font from the installed fonts. Select it. Once selected, an in-app panel will open listing all the emoji that are supported. You can scroll through the panel and view them all.

With the text input tool still active, drag out and draw a text box. Double-click the emoji you want to use to insert it. Like all other text, you can select an emoji and increase its size. For obvious reasons, you cannot change the color of an emoji.

You will find that if you add another text layer right after inserting an emoji, or if you change to a different font within the current text layer, the emoji you’ve inserted will disappear. This appears to be a limitation of the feature but it’s easy to work around.

Always keeps emoji on a separate text layer of their own. Don’t mix regular alphanumeric characters with emoji. When you need to insert a text layer after inserting an emoji layer, add a regular empty layer first before you activate the text input tool a second time. This will allow you to change the font without losing the emoji in your previous text input layer. You can delete the empty layer later.

Other Adobe Apps

If you want to insert emoji in other Adobe apps, for example in Illustrator, you will again need to activate the text input tool. It too will allow you to select a font. The font selection is key here. Enter the word emoji and it will find the emoji font, and open the emoji panel that you can then insert emoji from.

This ought to work on both macOS and Windows 10, and possibly also on Windows 7 and 8/8.1.

@HarryGuinness
December 21, 2017, 8:00am EDT

In the last few years, Emoji have become a huge part of pop culture. There’s even a movie about them (although I’m trying my best to forget that). With Photoshop CC 2017, Adobe added proper support for Emoji, so let’s look at how to use them.

Open the document you’re working on (or a blank one) in Photoshop.

Select the Type Tool with the keyboard shortcut T or from the Tools Menu.

In the menu bar, select the font dropdown and start typing “emoji”.

I’m on a Mac, so I’ve got two options: Apple Color Emoji and EmojiOne Color. If you’re on a PC, you’ll just see EmojiOne Color. Select the font you want to use.

Once you select an Emoji font, the Glyphs Panel will pop up.

Click anywhere in the document to start a new Type Layer and then select whatever Emoji you want to add by double clicking on it in the Glyphs Panel.

You can add more Emoji by double clicking on them, or clicking elsewhere in the document to start new Type Layers and adding them there.

The best thing about the Emoji fonts is that each glyph is a vector image. This means they can be scaled up or down without ever losing quality. Just press Control+T (Command+T on a Mac) to access the transform tool and resize the Emoji as big as you’d like.

Emoji are a big part of how people communicate. If you’re making a poster for an event or mocking up graphics for a website, you might want to use them in Photoshop. Now you know how.

In recent years, Emoji has become an important part of pop culture. There is even a movie about them (although I do my best to forget it). With Photoshop CC 2017, Adobe has added an appropriate support for Emoji, so let’s look at how to use them.

Open the document you are working on (or an empty document) in Photoshop.

Select the Text tool with the keyboard shortcut T or on the Tools menu.

In the menu bar, select the font drop-down list and start typing “emoji”.

I’m on a Mac, so I have two options: Apple Color Emoji and EmojiOne Color. If you are on a PC, you will simply see EmojiOne Color. Select the font you want to use.

Once you have selected an Emoji font, the Glyphs panel appears.

Click anywhere in the document to launch a new text layer, and then select the emoji you want to add by double-clicking it in the glyph panel.

You can add more Emoji by double-clicking on it, or clicking anywhere in the document to launch new type layers and add them to that location.

The best thing about Emoji fonts is that every glyph is a vector image . This means that they can be increased or reduced without ever losing in quality. Just press Ctrl + T (Command + T on a Mac) to access the transformation tool and resize the Emoji as big as you like.

Emoji are a big part of how people communicate. If you’re creating a poster for an event or creating graphics for a website, you can use them in Photoshop. Now you know how.

Harry Guinness writes from time to time when he is not busy skiing, sailing, partying, lifting weights or to dodge responsibility. His main centers of interest are himself, the gin and the crazy with interesting stories to tell. When people do not pay it to write badly thought articles, it covers photography, technology and culture. You can follow him on Twitter .

Emotes, emojis, smiley faces; whatever you call them they’re ubiquitous within blogs, text messages, and chat programs. Being on such a small scale makes this a job for some cute pixel art, which is easily accomplished in Adobe Photoshop.

1. Draw the Circle Base

Step 1

Make a New Document in Adobe Photoshop that’s about 200px by 200px, or so (whatever amount of space you dig), and set the background to Transparent. Use the Pencil Tool (B) with the brush set to 1pt and use the Zoom Tool (Z) to zoom in 1500-1600%.

The circle is simple: five pixels for the top, two on either side, one diagonal from the two side pixels, and two more pixels down on either side. Repeat for the rest of the circle (see below).

Step 2

Using the Paint Bucket Tool (G), fill in the circle with bright yellow (R: 255 G:204 B:51). Make sure Anti-alias is unchecked and Contiguous checked. Fill the black circle outline with dark yellow (R:102 G:51 B:0).

To tackle shading on the circle, reduce the Opacity of the Pencil Tool to 50% and concentrate these darkened pixels around the edge of the circle’s interior. Use the Eyedropper Tool (I) to sample the shadow color, set the Opacity back to 100% and place pixels around the corners of the circle’s sides (on either side of the strip of five pixels).

2. Make a Smiling Face

Step 1

Since we’ll be drawing multiple faces, make a New Layer (Control-N). Choose dark yellow again and draw two four-pixel boxes for the eyes. Shade between the eyes by reducing the Pencil Tool’s Opacity to 20%, or so. The mouth is seven pixels wide and recedes downward (7-5-3). Add shading pixels on either side (50% Opacity) and shade below the mouth (20% Opacity).

Step 2

Use white for bright highlights at 100%, 50%, and 30% to create dimension on the top of the circle, on the smiley face’s cheeks, and on the top lip. Note the various shades of yellow on the outer edges of the circle, placed there to smooth out the edges.

3. Alternative Faces

Step 1

Copy (Control-C) and Paste (Control-V) the base circle from Section 1. Make a New Layer. The process for the sad face is the same as Section 2’s happy face, but the mouth is five pixels across with two pixels on either lower diagonal.

Step 2

For the angry face, Copy and Paste the sad face.

1. Move the entire mouth down. The easiest way is to use the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) to select the mouth and surrounding shadows and highlights, and move it down by one pixel.
2. Extend the eye pixels from little boxes to little z-shapes. This way the eyes are squinting with a furrowed brow, rather than wide open.

Step 3

The laughing face has its eyes closed. Once again, Copy and Paste the main circle, this time with lines of shadow in the middle and at the bottom (see below). The eyes are closed and positioned downward while the mouth is positioned upward with shadow pixels covering most of the lower half of the circle.

Step 4

This emote is terribly simple: three pixels for each eye, and five for the mouth.

Step 5

Finally, the singing/whistling/”oohing” emoticon. The face starts out with the same base as all of the others within the set. The eyes are four-by-four squares. The mouth is two rows of three-by-two with a single pixel in the center top and bottom. Add highlights to the top left and dark shadows to the bottom to accentuate the shape of the mouth.

4. Easily Changing Colors

Step 1

Select your emoticons (in this case I’ve Merged Layers (Control-E) for example’s sake), and make a New Layer. Use the Paint Bucket Tool to fill the new layer’s selection with a flat color. In the Layers panel, change the Blending Mode to Color.

Repeat with other colors as often as you wish, rather than redrawing the entire emoticon.

Great Job, You’re Done!

Well done you! You’ve gone from zero to emoticon set in no time flat. Pixel art can be quite detailed for its small size, and at the same time, little mistakes in pixel placement can change an image’s look. It’s a fun way to spend some time, playing with little dots and seeing what develops.

Follow these step-by-step instructions for creating your own holiday emoji.

by The Creative Cloud Team

posted on 12-20-2017

Emojis are widely popular and pervasive, with new additions being added to Unicode frequently. They’re fun to create, but emoji projects can be quite extensive. Good planning and a basic understanding of the principles of emoji design are essential.

Dave Brasgalla is an emoji designer at Iconfactory, an award winning agency that specializes in designing for apps, icons, and, of course, emojis. We asked Dave to walk us through his emoji design process. You can download the source file and assets for this project here and follow along.

As an introductory example, Dave created a basic “Holiday Elf” emoji in Photoshop CC, with several sample variations in features that can easily be combined to form different expressions. This particular emoji takes general cues from Apple’s standard emoji as a stylistic starting point.

Before You Start

My name is Dave Brasgalla, and I’m excited to help you jump into designing an emoji today.

Here are some thoughts to consider before beginning: As emojis are most often used quite small, your goal should be to keep the expression of the emoji clear at those sizes. Hold this in mind as you work, and check your progress often by reducing the view as small as you can. It’s perfectly okay to add texture and fine detail to be seen at large presentation sizes, but make sure this detail doesn’t add visual noise or obscure readability once reduced. Focus on the elements that bring the emoji’s meaning to life, and resist the temptation to embellish simply for the sake of it.

Also, try to create as much of the illustration as possible using Layer Effects applied to vector shapes. Once you achieve the given look you are after for an element, you can save it as a Style, making it quick and easy to create new elements with that same look (or to edit existing styles over a large number of elements, should you need to).

Lastly, when sizing shapes and strokes, I generally try to work in multiples of 4 or 8, and I always use even-numbered measurements. I feel this makes the process of reduction function more smoothly, and lends a consistency to overall proportions. It can also help keep you from getting lost on the sizing as you work!

Basic Shapes and Silhouette

The first thing I want to do is determine the right size for the basic round emoji face. As emojis are often used quite small, I want to have the face be as large as possible while keeping a bit of room around it for special features or effects in future designs. Working at 1024×1024, I use guidelines to make an 8×8 grid. I don’t stick to this grid rigidly, but it helps keep me oriented. With pointed elf ears in mind, I decide that 820×820 feels like a good size, with enough space to have the ears stick out a bit for a recognizable silhouette.

Note that at this point, the emoji is basically four simple shapes: two concentric circles and two teardrop-shaped “ears.” The Main Emoji Shape and the Elf Ears layers have the same Layer Effects on them, with a Stroke on the inside edges to keep things sharp. The Emoji Inner Shading layer has an additional Gradient Stroke to create some highlights and dimensionality. A clipping mask on the Elf Ears layer lets me use a simple circle shape to create a shadow effect. With just these basic elements, we already have good-looking base to work on.

Adding a Hat

A Christmas-coloured wool cap makes a great prop for this emoji, both for the strengthening of the emoji’s silhouette, and the instant holiday-theme recognition that it brings — that’s a lot of value for one simple element!

I need to make the hat in two layer groups, as the top part sits “above” the face and facial details, while the tail needs to appear behind these elements. This is where the margin I left around the face comes in handy. There’s room to have some fun with the hat, but it doesn’t overwhelm the facial elements.

Note that I’ve used textures on the hat: a tabby wool texture overlay for the hat itself, and a fleecy texture for the Trim and Tail Ball. This was done using photographic texture layers and the Clipping Mask feature. I’ve been careful to keep these textures quite subtle, so that they should effectively disappear at small sizes. This approach is ideal for emoji work. For greater convenience, I could also add these textures to the Pattern Overlay Library so they could be part of a Style.

Face Time

I’m now ready to create some basic features, and a happy smile is always a great starting point. Beginning with basic, popular emotion metaphors helps build a solid foundation for your emoji suite, and will provide solid guidance if you progress to more complex metaphors.

Again, I’m keeping shapes as simple as possible, and letting Layer Effects and Clipping Masks do most of the work for me. Each eye is created from just three round shapes (with an extra layer of “eyelids” for later use), and the mouth is formed with a half-circle and a clipped rectangle. Some rosy dimples add life to the character, but are low-key enough not to interfere with the expression.

Seeing all the elements together, I decided that the stroke on the Inner Shading shape I mentioned earlier isn’t really necessary or desirable anymore, so I remove it. However, I did decide that this elf could do with a nose for extra cuteness, so I made a quick one based on some of Apple’s Unicode 10 additions.

Expanding Expressions

With my base features established, I created several variations of each to mix and match. Closed and half-closed eyes are a sensible starting place, and even a few mouth variations can go a long way. With only three mouth variations and five eye sets, I can generate quite a few fun expressions — more than enough to create a sample suite to present to a client, for example.

With some thoughtful planning and clever feature usage, even a large emoji suite can be easy and quick to create. Have fun with it, and let yourself get inspired to create your own original emoji.

Microsoft’s mobile efforts may have failed, at least in their current state, but the company has learned from it. And this shows quite clearly as newer Windows updates focus on the little things that have been absent from Windows but are quite common in the mobile space. A very good example of this is the new emoji panel introduced with the Fall Creators Update. Well, it isn’t exactly new considering the update actually has been around for a few months. Although, PC users, especially those without a touchscreen PC may never stumble upon it by chance. Which is why we’ll show you how to use Emoji on Windows 10.

An emoji is simply a way to add some fun to your text-based communication. It took Microsoft a while, after all, emoji have been around in the mobile culture for years. But better late than never. The reason why you won’t accidentally find it somewhere is that unlike a touchscreen device, you’d be using the hardware keyboard on your PC. It’s great for typing but it’s kind of set in its ways. Meaning, it’d not be possible to introduce a new emoji key onto it. This is why the Redmond based software giant decided to assign a key combination to the emoji panel, much like many of the features on Windows.

Not all Windows 10 users can use emoji

Emoji have actually been around on Windows 10 since the Creator’s update which arrived early in 2017. The implementation was not that great though. Emoji were only accessible via the touch keyboard so it didn’t matter if you had a hardware keyboard attached. Even if you did use the touch keyboard, typing emoji with it would only type text. For instance, if you typed a smiley face, all you’d get was 🙂 and not 😊. Not unless you used the PC in tablet mode.

That has changed, starting Windows 10 version 1709, or the Windows 10 Fall Creator’s Update as it is commonly known. This is currently the latest version of Windows available for general users so if your PC is up to date, you can use emoji on Windows 10. Here’s how.

Use Emoji on Windows 10 – Touch keyboard

1. Right-click in an empty space on your Windows 10 taskbar and select Show touch keyboard button.
2. You’ll notice a keyboard icon appear in the system tray on your taskbar, click on it.
3. This will launch the touch keyboard where you can touch or click on the emoji button and type any emoji you want or however many you want.

It’s that simple, but probably not as convenient as one would hope if not using a touchscreen device. There’s a better way to do this for those of you who prefer or use the hardware keyboard.

Use Emoji On Windows 10 – Keyboard shortcut

There are already so many keys on a physical keyboard fighting for space. This makes it difficult to sneak in a dedicated emoji key as well. This can be done, obviously, because manufacturers have found some clever ways of including extra keys on their keyboards all the time. It wouldn’t really surprise me if some manufacturer does include an emoji key on their keyboard, or if it has already been done. This can’t, however, be done as easily on a laptop keyboard.

But hey, keyboard shortcuts aren’t all that difficult to use. It may take a few minutes getting used to it but remember there was a time when Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V seemed complicated too.

1. To bring out the emoji panel on Windows 10, all you have to do is press the Windows key and then the dot and semi-colon key while still holding the Windows key. So the combination is Win+. or Win+;
2. This will make a panel appear containing all kinds of emoji which you can then type by clicking on any emoji. ✌

You can type as many emojis you want before you decide to close the panel. I felt the need to mention this because imagine how infuriating this could’ve been if the panel would automatically disappear after you clicked an emoji. Microsoft nailed it this time. Our next tip relates to speeding up the boot time on Windows 10 PCs and I think you should check that out before leaving.

Emmanouil F Ioannidis

Feb 1, 2018 · 2 min read

Lately I designed a landing page for an online city guide and wanted to use Emoji characters as part of my design. But, I didn’t know how to do it.

So, I had to learn.

Here’s 7 simple steps on how I did it:

1. Create a text field in a Photoshop document
2. Click on the Language picker menu on the menu bar (that’s for Mac OS, have no idea whatsoever how to do that on Windows)
3. Select Show Emoji and Symbols to open the Character Viewer
4. Navigate to the Emoji you desire to use and double click on it while the text field in Photoshop is active and ready for input
5. You will notice that the emoji goes into the text field but does not appear properly. That is because the font you are using does not support Emoji.
6. Change your font to either Apple Color Emoji Regural or EmojiOne Color, whichever you like best.
7. 7 Drag and drop your emoji into an Illustrator layer.

You now have your Emoji cut out and ready to use in your designs. No screenshots, no hassle, no worries.

Feedback, comments, requests? Let me know in the comments section.

Hello everyone, In this tutorial, we’ll be learning how we can add Emojis in a Python Program. Emojis are a visual representation of an emotion or an entity from various genres. It can be used to make something more readable and is a very good way to show emotions and feelings. We will make use of External Python library named ‘Emoji’ to add emojis and to decode an emoji into its text representation. Let us start this tutorial by Installing the required library.

Installing Emoji

To install Emoji, Goto Command line and run the following command.

Now we can make use of emoji in our Python Program.

Using Emoji with Python

The first step is to import the required library.

Now let us Print a sentence with emoji. For this, we will be using emojize() which can make an emoji out of a specific text and see what we will get.

The output will look something like this.

Looking nice. Now let us decode an emoji to its textual representation. Taking the previous output we will give it as an argument in a function named demojize() and see the result.

The output of the above code will be.

But whenever we want to write a sentence with emoji we have to give ‘:’ as prefix and suffix to the text-representation of an emoji like :snake: and for every sentence, we are required to use emojize(). To solve these we can create a function like the one below.

We have created a function that takes the word and will convert it into the corresponding emoji. We have shown the use of delimiters that takes two strings which represent the prefix and suffix with the word. Now it becomes easy for us to use emoji in our Program.

The complete list of emoji with their text-representation can be found here.

We hope you like this tutorial and if you have any doubts, feel free to leave a comment below.

@HarryGuinness
December 22, 2017, 8:00am EDT

There are plenty of reasons you might want to blur some part of a photo in Photoshop. Maybe you’re sharing a photo and you want to anonymize some people, or perhaps you want to show off how bad your passport photo is without revealing private information. Whatever the reason, here’s how to blur something in Photoshop.

Open the image you want to blur in Photoshop. I’m going to use this photo of me and a friend on a mountain.

Select the Marquee Tool from the Tool Bar, or with the keyboard shortcut M.

Draw a selection around the area of the image you want to blur. In this case it’s my friends face, but it could also be your passport number, address, or anything else.

Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. The Gaussian Blur menu will pop up and you’ll see a preview of the effect it has on the select area.

Dial the radius up until it’s completely blurring the area you want.

Click OK and the effect will be applied. You can now save your new, nicely anonymised image.

Blurring objects is a really useful thing to be able to do in Photoshop. You’ll regularly see screenshots on How-To Geek where private information has been anonymized this way. If you want to make a more accurate selection, you can always combine this technique with some others you know, such as how to use layers and masks.