Thursday 27 December 2012

Custom Shapes As Text Frames In Photoshop

Here’s an example of the effect we’ll be learning to create.you can use a different image if you prefer, or simply create a new Photoshop document with a white background to use as you follow along:

Step 1: Select The Custom Shape Tool
Select Photoshop’s Custom Shape Tool from the Tools panel. By default, it’s hiding behind the Rectangle Tool, so click on the Rectangle Tool’s icon and hold your mouse button down for a second or two until a fly-out menu appears showing a list of the other tools available in that spot, then select the Custom Shape Tool from the list:

Step 2: Choose A Shape
With the Custom Shape Tool selected, click on the shape preview thumbnail in the Options Bar along the top of the screen:

This opens Photoshop’s Shape Picker, which displays small thumbnails of all the custom shapes we can choose from. To select a shape, just click on its thumbnail. I’m going to choose the heart shape. Once you’ve chosen a shape, press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to close out of the Shape Picker:

Step 3: Select The “Paths” Option
Near the far left of the Options Bar is a row of three icons, each one representing a different type of shape we can draw. Photoshop gives us a choice of drawing normal shapes, paths, or pixel-based shapes. To use a shape as a container for our text, we want to draw a path, which is essentially an outline of the shape. We’ll be placing our text inside the outline. Click on the middle of the three icons to select the Paths option:

Step 4: Draw Your Shape
With the Paths option selected in the Options Bar, click inside your document and drag out your shape. You’ll see your shape appearing as a thin outline as you drag. You can hold down your Shift key as you drag to force the shape to keep its original appearance while you’re drawing it. If you need to reposition the shape as you’re drawing it, hold down your spacebar, drag the shape to where you need it in the document, then release your spacebar and continue dragging. Here, I’ve drawn my heart shape in the top right section of the image:

Step 5: Reshape, Rotate Or Move The Path (Optional)
If you need to reshape or rotate the path (the shape outline), or move it to a different spot, the easiest way to do it is by going up to the Edit menu in the Menu Bar along the top of the screen and choosing Free Transform Path. You could also press Ctrl+T (Win) / Command+T (Mac) to quickly select the same command with the keyboard shortcut:

This places the Free Transform Path handles and bounding box around the shape. To reshape it, simply click on any of the handles (the small squares) around the bounding box and drag them. To resize the shape, hold down your Shift key and drag any of the four corner handles. To rotate it, move your cursor anywhere outside the bounding box, then click and drag with your mouse. Finally, to move the shape, click anywhere inside the bounding box and drag.
I’m going to rotate my heart shape a little so the curve down the left side flows better with the layout of the flowers:

Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) when you’re done to accept the changes and exit out of the Free Transform Path command:

Step 6: Select The Type Tool
Now that we have our path, we’re ready to add our text! Select the Type Tool from the Tools panel:

Step 7: Choose Your Font
Select the font you want to use for your text in the Options Bar. For my design, I’ll use Palatino Italic set to 12 pt:

To choose a color for my text, I’ll click on the color swatch in the Options Bar:

This opens Photoshop’s Color Picker. I’ll choose a dark green from the Color Picker to match the color from the flowers in my image. Once you’ve chosen a color, click OK to close out of the Color Picker:

Step 8: Open The Paragraph Panel
Click on the Character / Paragraph panel toggle icon to the right of the color swatch in the Options Bar:

This opens Photoshop’s Character and Paragraph panels which are hidden by default. Select the Paragraph panel by clicking on its name tab at the top of the panel group:

Step 9: Choose The “Justify Centered” Option
With the Paragraph panel now open, click on the Justify Centered option to select it. This will make it easier for the text we’re about to add to fill the entire width of the shape. When you’re done, click again on the toggle icon in the Options Bar to hide the Character and Paragraph panels since we no longer need them:

Step 10: Add Your Text
At this point, all that’s left to do is add our text. Move the Type Tool’s cursor anywhere inside the shape. You’ll see a dotted ellipse appear around the cursor icon, which is Photoshop’s way of telling us that we’re about to add our text inside the path:
Click anywhere inside the shape and begin typing your text. As you type, you’ll see that the text is constrained to the area inside the path:
Step 11: Click On The Checkmark To Accept Your Text
When you’re done adding your text, click on the checkmark in the Options Bar to accept it and exit out of Photoshop’s text editing mode:

The text has now been added and fills the shape area nicely, but we can still see the path outline around it:

To hide the path outline, simply click on a different layer in the Layers panel. In my case, my document only contains two layers – the Type layer that holds my text (which is currently selected) and the Background layer below it that holds my background image, so I’ll click on the Background layer to select it:

And with that, we’re done! The text I added may not win me any literary awards, but we’ve now seen how easy it is to use Photoshop’s custom shapes as containers for text:


Wednesday 26 December 2012

Creating Warped Text In Photoshop

To use the Warp Text options, we first need to add some text to our document. Here’s a simple design I have open on my screen with some text added in front of a background image:

If we look in my Layers panel, we see that my document contains two layers, with my Type layer sitting above the image on the Background layer:
The Layers panel showing the Type layer above the Background layer.

Notice that my Type layer is selected (highlighted in blue) in the Layers panel. We need to have the Type layer selected before we can apply any of the Warp Text options to it. We also need to have the Type Tool selected, so I’ll grab it from the Tools panel:
Selecting the Type Tool from the Tools panel.

Choosing A Warp Style
With the Type Tool in hand and the Type layer selected in the Layers panel, click on the Warp Text option in the Options Bar. It’s the icon that looks like a letter T with a curved line below it:
Clicking on the Warp Text option in the Options Bar.

This opens Photoshop’s Warp Text dialog box where we can choose which warping option we want to apply. Photoshop refers to the various warping options as styles, but by default, the Style option at the very top of the dialog box is set to None, which is why nothing has happened yet to our text:
The Warp Text dialog box.

If we click on the word “None”, we open a list of all the different warp styles we can choose from. There’s 15 of them in total. If you’ve used Adobe Illustrator, these text warping options may look familiar since they’re the exact same ones found in Illustrator. We won’t go through all of them here since you can easily experiment with them on your own, but as an example, I’ll choose the first style in the list, Arc:
Selecting the Arc style from the top of the list.

As soon as I select a style, Photoshop applies it to my text in the document, giving me an instant preview of what the effect looks like:
Photoshop shows us a live preview of the result in the document.

Adjusting The Warp With The Bend Option
Once we’ve chosen a style, we can adjust the intensity of the warping effect using the Bend option. By default, the Bend value is set to 50% but we can easily adjust it by dragging the slider left or right. I’ll drag the slider towards the left to lower my Bend amount down to 25%:
Lowering the Bend value for the Arc style to 25%.

And now we can see in the document that the warping effect has less “bend” to it:

The warping effect has been reduced after lowering the Bend value.

If we continue dragging the Bend slider towards the left, past the mid-way point, we’ll move into the negative percentage values. I’ll drag my Bend value to -25%:
Dragging the Bend slider into the negative values.

This changes the shape of the bend from positive to negative so that the text now arcs downward instead of up:
The text now arcs downward with a negative Bend value.

The Horizontal And Vertical Options
If you look directly above the Bend option in the Warp Text dialog box, you’ll find two more options that control the direction of the warp, Horizontal and Vertical. The Horizontal option is selected for us by default and it’s usually the one you’ll want to use, but we can also have our text warp vertically. I’ll choose the Vertical option:
Selecting the Vertical option.

With Vertical selected, my text now warps from left to right rather than up or down. It’s interesting, but not really what I want for this particular design. In most cases, you’ll want to leave the direction set to Horizontal:
The Arc style now warps the text from left to right with Vertical selected.

Next, we’ll look at Horizontal Distortion and Vertical Distortion, two interesting but potentially confusing options that have nothing at all to do with your chosen warp style.

Horizontal and Vertical Distortion
There are two other options in the bottom half of the Warp Text dialog box – Horizontal Distortion and Vertical Distortion. These two options can be a bit confusing because while the Bend value controls the intensity of our chosen warp style, the Horizontal and Vertical Distortion options are completely independent effects. What makes it confusing is that Photoshop forces us to choose a style from the Style option before it gives us access to the Horizontal and Vertical Distortion sliders, but the distortion effects have nothing to do with the style we chose and in fact, we can use these sliders even if we effectively turn the warp style off.
To show you what I mean, I’ll leave my warp style set to Arc, but I’ll set my Bend value to 0% by dragging the slider to the mid-way point:
Leaving Arc selected but setting the Bend value to 0%.

Even though I have Arc chosen as my warp style, with Bend set to 0%, the style currently has no effect on my text because no bend is being applied:
A Bend value of 0% effectively turns the style off.

I’ll drag the Horizontal Distortion slider to the right to set the value around 80%:
Increasing Horizontal Distortion to 80%.

This creates somewhat of a 3D perspective effect as if the text is moving closer to us from left to right, but all it’s really doing is squishing the letters towards the left and stretching them towards the right. If you’re trying to create a true perspective effect, you’ll get better results using Photoshop’s Free Transform command:
The result of applying horizontal distortion to the text.

Like the Bend option, we can set the Horizontal or Vertical Distortion options to negative values as well by dragging the slider to the left. I’ll drag the Horizontal Distortion slider to -80%:
Lowering the Horizontal Distortion to -80%.

This gives us the same pseudo-perspective effect but in the opposite direction:
A negative Horizontal Distortion value flips the direction of the effect.

We can get similar results from the Vertical Distortion option except that the effect will be vertical rather than horizontal. I’ll set the Horizontal Distortion option back to 0%, then I’ll increase Vertical Distortion to 25% by dragging the slider to the right:
Increasing Vertical Distortion to 25%.

This gives the text a familiar “Star Wars” look, but again, it’s not a true perspective effect. The Free Transform command would still produce better results:
The text with 25% Vertical Distortion applied.

As we saw with the Horizontal Distortion option, we can flip the result by setting Vertical Distortion to a negative value. I’ll drag the slider to -25%:
Lowering Vertical Distortion to -25%.

This time, we get an upside down “Star Wars” effect:
The text with Vertical Distortion set to -25%.

It’s unlikely that you’ll want to use the Horizontal and Vertical Distortion options very often, and as I mentioned, they’re completely independent of the warp style you’ve chosen. In most cases, you’ll simply want to choose a warp style from the Style option and then adjust the intensity of the warp using the Bend slider while leaving the Horizontal and Vertical Distortion options set to their default values of 0%. Making Changes To The Warping Effect
Once you’re happy with the results, click OK in the top right corner of the Warp Text dialog box to close out of it. If you then look in the Layers panel, you’ll see that the icon in the Type layer’s thumbnail has changed to indicate that warping effects are being applied to the text on that layer:
The Type layer now displays the Warp Text icon in the thumbnail.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the tutorial, one of the great things about these text warping options is that they’re not permanently applied to the text. We can go back at any time and change any of the warp settings, including the warp style itself. To do that, make sure you have your Type layer and the Type Tool selected, then simply click again on the Warp Text icon in the Options Bar:
Clicking again on the Warp Text option.

This re-opens the Warp Text dialog box where you can make any changes you need. I think I’ll change my warp style from Arc to Flag, then I’ll set my Bend value to 25%:
Changing the Style from Arc to Flag and setting Bend to 25%.

Just like that, I get a different warping effect applied to my text and all I had to do was choose a different style from the list. You can go back and make changes as many times as you like, so be sure to try out all 15 warp styles to see what effect each one will give you. You’ll find that some are a lot crazier than others. To cancel the warping effect and switch back to your normal text, simply choose None from the Style option:

The same text with the Flag style applied. And there we have it! That’s how to create simple text effects using the Warp Text options in Photoshop!

Create Brushes As Stencils in Photoshop

Photoshop can make real easy work of your stencils.

First, let’s start with the image we want to make a stencil of. You’re going to want to go to your Channels palette [Window > Channels] and try to find the channel that has the most contrast. For me, it was the Blue channel.

Right click on the channel and choose “Duplicate Channel…” You can name it whatever you want. With your duplicated channel selected, bring up the Levels dialog [Ctrl + L]. Play with the sliders until you get a decent edge and enough of the detail you want.

Hold the [Ctrl] key and click on your new channel, this will bring it up as a selection. Press [Ctrl + Shift + I] to inverse your selection. Now click on the RGB (or CMYK) channel.

Now go up to [Edit > Define Brush Preset...]. Name it whatever you want, just as long as it’s something you can remember.

Now you have your brush stencil made. Go to whatever document you want and select the brush tool [B]. Go up to your Brush Presets in your Option Bar and scroll to the bottom… you should see your newly created brush.

Now you can just paint your ‘stencil’ on like a normal brush. You can even adjust the size by using the [{] and [}] keys.