What Does Kerning Control in Photoshop?

Kerning in Adobe Photoshop controls the horizontal spacing between two specific, adjacent typographic characters. This article explains the exact design adjustments kerning manages, how it differs from overall letter spacing, why it is essential for professional visual balance, and the methods available in Photoshop to adjust it precisely.

The Specific Adjustment: Horizontal Pair Spacing

Kerning directly adjusts the horizontal distance between a pair of individual letters, numbers, or punctuation marks. The primary goal is to achieve an optically balanced distribution of space. Because letterforms have unique geometric shapes—such as the diagonal strokes of "A" and "V" or the overhang of "T"—standard character spacing often results in awkward, uneven gaps. Kerning allows designers to move these individual characters closer together (negative kerning) or farther apart (positive kerning) to eliminate visual inconsistencies.

Kerning vs. Tracking

It is common to confuse kerning with tracking, but they serve different typographic purposes:

  • Kerning targets the space between a single pair of characters. It is applied selectively to correct problem pairs (such as "To", "Wa", or "Yo").
  • Tracking (often called letter-spacing) adjusts the spacing uniformly across an entire range of selected characters, words, or paragraphs.

Kerning Modes in Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop provides three distinct ways to handle kerning within the Character panel (Window > Character):

  1. Metrics Kerning: This default setting uses the built-in kerning pairs programmed into the font file by the type designer. It relies on the font's native spacing rules.
  2. Optical Kerning: Photoshop analyzes the actual visual shapes of adjacent characters and automatically calculates the optimal spacing. This setting is particularly useful when pairing different fonts, using novelty or display fonts with poor built-in metrics, or mixing sizes.
  3. Manual Kerning: Designers can manually fine-tune spacing by placing the text insertion point directly between two characters in the text layer. You can then enter a specific numeric value in the Kerning field of the Character panel, or use the keyboard shortcut Alt + Left/Right Arrow (Windows) or Option + Left/Right Arrow (macOS) to decrease or increase space in increments.

Why Kerning Matters

Unkerned text can look disjointed, hard to read, and amateurish, especially at large display sizes such as in headlines, billboards, and logos. Proper kerning creates optical consistency, ensuring that the visual density of the text remains even and distraction-free across the entire composition.