Word for Wednesday – text tutorial
Hello and happy Wednesday. Brittney here on “Words for Wednesday”.
I have had a couple people ask me how I make my text wrap around my embellishments, like in this LO for example.
While there are several ways I do it, depending on the shape, I’ll show you the quick & dirty way. Hopefully you’ll learn something new and have a new way to manipulate your words and journaling on your LOs.
(These steps are for Photoshop. I’m not an Elements user so I’m not sure if you can do this same thing in Elements. Someone who uses Elements, let me know in the comments section!!)
Ok – Step 1: Select your Polygonal Lasso Tool.
Step 2: Click, click, click out a shape that will evenutally be the shape of your text box. HELPFUL HINT: on the straight edges – in my case the top, bottom, and right side, make sure you get your bars perfectly straight or the text will do wonky things. The more clicks you make, the smoother the text box will be, but it doesn’t have to be a perfect curve, the text will still look great.
Step 3: With your selection made (and those marching ants still marching), on your palettes menu, next to the layers you’ll find a tab named “Paths”. Click it!
Step 4: On the far right side of the pallette box there is a little drop down menu marked by three lines and little triangle. Click this drop down menu and select “Make Work Path”. Just click ok on the next box that pops up.
Step 5: Now your selection has been turned into a path, which will look like this. If you select your type tool and hover it inside the box you’ll see the text tool get a little dotted ring around it. I couldn’t get a screen shot of this, so I did my best to give you an idea of what it will look like. When the text tool has the dotted ring around it, that means it will type within this path. If you hover your curser over the edge of the path your text tool will get a wavy line through it. If you click while you have the wavy line through it, your text will go AROUND the path’s edges. But for this one, we want to type inside the path/box so click when you have the dotted circle text icon.
Step 6: Just type your journaling now and format it however you like.
And that’s it. The little path lines will go away if you click on another layer. Pretty simple.
Like I said, there are many other ways to do custom text paths, but this is a really easy method.
Hope this all made sense. Feel free to PM me if it didn’t!!
Make your words matter!!
xoxo
May 21st, 2008 at 9:58 am
As far as I have ever been able to figure out, you can’t do this in Elements. There is no option for “paths.” If anyone else knows how to do it in Elements, I would LOVE to know how!
May 21st, 2008 at 10:15 am
super helpful!! it usually takes me forever to do a custom text shape like this~I can’t wait to try your method!!
May 21st, 2008 at 10:30 am
No, unfortunately and much to my dismay you cannot do this in Elements. Ug!!! I really want CS3!!!! Anyway, I have found a very time consuming process that will let you get the same results. You just have to type in each individual line of text separately making each one a separate text box and layer. That way you can make it the size and length you need, but that’s also why mine are always VERY short journaling entries!!! LOL! If anyone knows a better way in Elements I’m dying to hear it!
May 21st, 2008 at 11:37 am
Great tutorial Britt.
Jeni, I don’t know a better way to format text in PSE. They can’t make it do everything or no one would ever buy CS3–since PSE6 does so much!
May 21st, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Oh wow! Thanks for this. I never thought there might be an easier way, lol. I usually type one line at a time and move it around, this is so much easier!
May 21st, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Great tut Britt – I was just trying to figure this out during our speed scrap this week – did I mention I got PSCS3???!!! Yippee!
I know a couple of folks have mentioned that this does not work in PSE – and they are very right on that. I think lining them up like they mentioned is the best way to do that. I did write a mini tut a while back on how to make some other text shapes in PSE. You can find it here:
http://scrapmatters.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=164
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:32 am
I use PSE. One trick I’ve used, like when my journaling is on a circle, is to make my text box bigger than the circle and then manually add in spaces and hard returns so that the text looks like it follows the shape. Does that make sense? It works for me.
August 3rd, 2008 at 10:59 am
Do you know if there is a way to make this work in Photo Shop 7.0?