Why and when do I have to rasterize my shapes and text in Photoshop?
Depending on what you want to do, you don’t necessarily have to rasterize anything. When you save your final .psd file as a .jpg, .gif or .bmp image, Photoshop basically smooshes all your layers down into one flat raster image for you. There are certain functions in Photoshop that you can only perform on a rasterized layer that you can’t perform on a vector or text layer. Allow me to illuminate. Example One: You type some text, then you grab your paint brush and try to paint something. You don’t want to paint ON your text directly, you just want to paint in the Photoshop document you’re making. But you get this error: “This type layer must be rasterized before proceeding. Its text will no longer be editable. Do you want to rasterize the type?” You’re getting this because Photoshop thinks you want to paint with your paintbrush directly onto the type. Why does it think that? Because you have a type layer selected. The paint brush tool creates raster brush strokes. The type tool creates n
I just had a case where I did not select the MOVE TOOL and tried to make a pictorial change to a TEXT layer and it gave me this error. When I switch back to the MOVE TOOL (or the relevant tool), I could easily do what I intended to, without having to rasterize my shape and (especially) text.
This might be useful as a reminder.
