Kerning on Photoshop broken

You can adjust kerning between characters by positioning the cursor there, pressing Alt and using the arrow key. However, I have a really weird bug - I have the word "Essential", and the "t" and the "i" are squashed together. I can't fix that - I can position the cursor between the "t" and "i", but when I try to fix the Kerning, it moves the "a" instead. If I move the cursor before the t, it moves the t and i together.

Yet again, I've had to rely on Powerpoint to add text to Photoshop images.

I have the same problem. I can't ajust the space between the characters. It always worked like a charm and in illustrator it works well. Don't know how to get rid of this error.

Yeah I'm getting this same issue. With defaults selected, all the letters are tracked incorrectly. I thought it was a specific font, but nope. They're all messed up. Was hoping I didn't have to delete re-install though. OH. Just realized, I updated my version yesterday. So that could def be the issue.

Ahh, maybe I did not explain so well. I wanted the tracking at -35 to tighten up the text for this piece of work. The issue I was having was usually there is equidistant spacing between letters. But, only very recently the spacing had become totally different between letters as seen above. Weirdly it is fixed after my deleting all Ps data and then reinstalling. 

@Jamie5EAB 

I had thought your issue was that the letters were too close, making the text hard to read, but now you say you are intentionally choosing -35 for the extremely tight tracking.

Can I ask what the issue was that you were trying to solve?

Jane

I'm glad you fixed it, but the previous screen shot looks correct for the tracking you used. The font designer made the font to be "optically correct" at 0 tracking, and this correctness is a careful balance of optical illusions, since curves together give a different illusion than straight edges together. By tracking tightly you have virtually removed the space between letters, but the illusion is drastically different between straight edges together and curved edges together; you still have the illusion of space between curved letters even if they overlap, while straight letters merge to one. Every font can tolerate some tracking, but finding the reasonable limit needs an experiment. (In fact it looks as if you did exactly that experiment, and found it too high). 

I have always used tracking at -35 

Apologies, I said kerning when in actual fact I meant tracking. You can see the confusion is easy as tracking usually affects kerning of the whole word, no? A small technicality. The other creatives in my team have opened up the file and still have the same issues?

I even created a new file and still experience these issues? 

This still doesn't help 

@Jamie5EAB 

Kerning is the space between two letters; tracking is the space between a range of letters. Currently your kerning shows zero and your tracking shows -20.

• To change the tracking, select the text first. It's a character setting.
• To change kerning, click in between each pair of letters.
  When text is selected, the kerning control will give you a choice of optical or metrics, which will automatically apply different kerning unless manual kerning has been applied. Yours says 0, meaning text is not selected.

Select your text and show screen shot of your selected text with the Character panel (Window menu).

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/line-character-spacing.html

~ Jane