Meet the Note Tool Photoshop Tutorial

Sometimes you play around in Photoshop, make something neat, and then can’t remember how you did it. What was that filter again? And which setting? Or maybe you’re sending a file to someone and need to explain something; What you need is the often overlooked Note Tool.

The Note Tool is in the Toolbox, on the lower left, right above the Hand. The purpose of the Note Tool is to attach little notes to your .psd files. Think of it like attaching a Post-It to a paper report. There are two versions of Photoshop Notes: text and audio.

To create a text note, click on the Note Tool when it is shaped as a sheet of notepaper. If it’s shaped like a loudspeaker, right click and toggle to the notepaper. Your mouse pointer will now become a note icon.

Now click anywhere on your document. A note window will pop up. If you look just below the top menu of Photoshop, you will see how you can adjust the author, font, font size, and colour of the note. Adjusting the colour could be useful for sorting at a glance–Green for To-Dos, Blue for settings, White for reminders, Red for jots to a co-designer, and so on.

Click in this window and type your note text. As you can see, it has a scroll, you can type as much as you like, in case you’re having a wild verbose Victorian novel moment. When you’re done, click on the tiny dot-square in the upper right of the note window. This closes your note.

You can drag and drop your note around like any other object, and double clicking will allow you to edit and view.

You can create any number of notes as you need them, and you can actually place and edit several at once. If you want to say, note your settings, and give a shout out to Bobbette about the why those settings are so superfine.

Of course, if you have notes squatting all over your document like a connect the dots exercise, this can be distracting. To hide your notes from view, go to View->Extras and your notes will disappear. They’re still there, just temporarily invisible. You can toggle them on and off this way at any time. If you add another note, they will also reappear.

A variation on the Note Tool is audio notes. These work the same way as text notes. Again, go to your Note Tool in the toolbox, but use right click to toggle to the loudspeaker icon.

Click anywhere on your document. A popup will appear.

It has three options: Start, Stop, and Cancel. Using a microphone, press start to begin recording an audio note. Press ‘Stop’ to finish recording, or ‘Cancel’ to abort.

When you complete your audio note, you’ll see a little loudspeaker embedded in your document. Again, you can drag and drop this icon within your document. You can adjust its colour or the author. Double clicking on it will play your audio clip. Right click will reveal the option to delete this annotation, or all annotations.

It’s important to note that audio clips cannot be edited or added to, only created or deleted. Also, you must remember that notes are only preserved in Photoshop’s native format, .psd. If you save it as a jpeg or mail your friend a gif, those files will not have access to your notes.

There you have it, a simple handy feature of your favorite Toolbox.