First off - I am not a graphic designer, but want to be. I have become a little familiar with Photoshop and yesterday was my first time using Illustrator.
I purchased this image from shutterstock - http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-116461561/stock-vector-retro-poster-design-with-clouds-vector-illustration.html
I thought I could just open it in Photoshop, the text portions of it would be in separate layers. I could just edit the text in those layers and voila I will have a poster with my text instead of the sample text but in the same style as the sample.
Well first I found out that if opened in Photoshop, the whole file is converted/merged/rasterized into a single layer. So I opened it in Illustrator. In illustrator there is a layer for each letter in the text and they are compound paths (I learned the term half an hour ago). I could not find any way to change the text even when I have a layer with an alphabet selected and the type tool selected. I 'released' the compound paths thinking that will show the real text layer, but no and of course the text lost some of the styling/effect .
This is how the layers look in Illustrator -
So questions -
Is there a text layer at all? Is there a way to modify the text while keeping the style the same? Or if its not a text layer, did they hand draw the text with the pen or pencil tool? If they actually used a font, do you recognize it what font this is? And what effects have been applied? Sorry for the slew of questions.