We love Photoshop as much as the next designer (okay… we may love it too much). Photoshop has awesome controls for everything, especially text. Except designing text in Photoshop was not such a good idea if you intended to animate the text, as it came in as all one piece and rasterized (not a good idea if you intend to scale and move it around). But fortunately Adobe caught on and fixed this in After Effects 6.5.
1. Build your text inside Photoshop using all of the Paragraph and Character formatting controls you need. However, stay away from layer styles, as you’ll be better off adding those in AE for animated text layers.
2. Import your PSD file as a composition.
3. Select the text layer(s) and choose Layer>Convert to Editable Text.
4. Begin to animate.