Adobe Photoshop Text Tutorial: Creating Text On A Path

It was a long time coming, but as of Photoshop CS, Adobe has finally included a way to add type to a path in Photoshop. Unfortunately, this means that this tutorial doesn't apply to you if you're using Photoshop 7 or earlier, but feel free to read through it anyway if you are, as it just might be enough to convince you to finally upgrade.

Creating type on a path in Photoshop is as easy as, well, creating a path and typing on it. It's really that simple.

You can create a path in Photoshop in a couple of ways. You can grab the Pen Tool from the Tools palette and draw yourself a freeform path which is always fun, or you can grab one of the Shape tools, like the Rectangle Tool or the Ellipse Tool, drag out a shape, and then add your type around the outline of the shape.

Since the Pen Tool can be a little intimidating and confusing to beginning Photoshop users, we'll keep things simple for this tutorial and use one of the Shape tools, the Ellipse Tool, to create our path.

Creating A Path With The Shape Tools

I've gone ahead and created myself a new document inside Photoshop, by using the handy keyboard shortcut "Ctrl+N", which would be "Command+N" if you're on a Mac, and I've set my document size to 500 px x 500 px, which should be fine for the sake of this tutorial. If you're following along, you can of course make your document any size you like.

With my new Photoshop document created, I'm going to select the Ellipse Tool from the Tools palette. By default, the Ellipse Tool is hidden behind the Rectangle Tool in the Tools palette, so to access it, you'll need to click and hold your mouse down on the Rectangle Tool icon for a moment, which will cause a flyout menu to appear showing all the additional tools hiding behind the Rectangle Tool. Click on the Ellipse Tool in the list to select it.

Vectors, Pixels and Paths

With the Ellipse Tool selected, there's one option we need to change up in the Options Bar.

Photoshop gives us three choices when working with the Shape tools. We can create vector shapes, we can create pixel-filled shapes, or we can create paths, which are essentially nothing more than shape outlines. Since we'll be creating our shape for the purpose of adding text to a path, we'll need to make sure we have the "Paths" option selected for our Ellipse Tool in the Options Bar.

You'll see a group of three icons in the Options Bar, immediately to the right of the Tool Preset picker on the far left. The first icon on the left of the group looks like a square with small boxes in the corners. That's the "Shapes" option. The icon on the right of the group which looks like a simple square is the "Fill Pixels" option, and the icon in the middle, which looks like the Shapes option icon but with a pen tip in the middle of it, is the "Paths" icon. That's the one we want, so go ahead and click on it to select it.

Drag Out A Path Shape

With our Ellipse Tool selected from the Tools palette and the "Paths" option selected in the Options Bar, we can go ahead and drag out an ellipse-shaped path.

Click somewhere in the top left corner of your Photoshop document and begin dragging towards the bottom right corner to create your shape path. If you want to constrain your shape to a perfect circle as I've done in the image below, hold down the "Shift" key as you drag. Release your mouth when you're happy with the size and shape of your path.

Select The Type Tool

Now that we have our path, half the work is already done. All we need to do now is grab the Horizontal Type Tool from the Tools palette, click with it somewhere along the path, and begin typing!

First, select the Horizontal Type Tool (also known as simply "the Type Tool") from the Tools palette, or press the letter "T" on your keyboard to use the quick shortcut.

Move Your Mouse Cursor Over The Path

Next, with the Type Tool selected, move your mouse cursor over the path at the point you want your text to begin.

As you move your cursor over the path, you'll see it change shape to indicate that your text will follow the path if you begin typing at that spot. Since that's exactly what we want, go ahead and click your mouse on the path and begin typing. As you type, you'll see that your text is following along the shape of the path.

As you can see in the image above, my type wrapped itself nicely around the path I created with the Ellipse Tool.

The Text Is Still Text

Keep in mind that even though the text is following the shape of a path rather than a normal baseline, it is still 100% text, which means you can still work with it the same way as you would work with text normally. You can edit the text, you can spell check it if you need to, and you can access all of the same text options from the Options Bar, the Character Palette and the Paragraph Palette. You can even use Text Warp options on text that's following a path! There's nothing you can't do with text on a path that you can't do with text normally.

Moving The Text Along The Path

Once you have your text created on your path, you can drag the text back and forth along the path. To do that, you need either the Path Selection Tool or the Direct Selection Tool from the Tools palette. You'll find them both directly to the left of the Type Tool. The Direct Selection Tool (the black arrow) is the one that displays in the Tools palette by default, with the Direct Selection Tool (the white arrow) hiding behind it.

With either tool selected, move your cursor over top of your text, and you'll see your cursor change into an I-beam with an arrow pointing either left or right. Click and drag with your mouse to move your text back and forth along the path.

As you're dragging your text along the path, you may notice the end of your text being cut off unexpectedly. That's because you've pushed the end of the text beyond the visible text area on the path. To fix the problem, look along the path after the spot where your text is being cut off, and you'll see a small circle. If your text is in fact being cut off, the circle will have a small "x" inside it, otherwise it will be empty. This circle represents the end point of the visible area of text on the path. All you need to do is move your Path Selection Tool or Direct Selection Tool over the small circle and drag it the same way as you were dragging your text, until all of your text along the path is visible again.

Flipping The Text And Reversing Direction

Not only can you drag the text back and forth along the path, you can also flip the text from one side of the path to the other, again using either the Path Selection Tool or the Direct Selection Tool.

With either tool selected, move your mouse cursor over your text until it changes to the I-beam with the left or right pointing arrow, and then drag from the one side of the path to the other. In the case of our elliptical shape path, I'll drag from the outside of the shape to the inside, and as I do, my text flips to the inside of the shape. It also reverses the direction of the text at the same time.

And that's our look at adding text to a path in Photoshop, using the Shape tools to create our path.