Written By Steve Patterson, Photoshop Essentials.com

In this Photoshop text tutorial, we're going to use a letter as a container for the rest of our text.

Step 1: Create A New Document

First, we need a document, so use the keyboard shortcut "Ctrl+N" (Win) or "Command+N" (Mac) to quickly bring up Photoshop's New Document dialog box. Choose the size you want for your document. I'll choose the 640x480 pixels preset size from the Preset selection box. Click "OK" when you're done.

Step 2: Select The Horizontal Type Tool

Next, in order to add our text, we need to Horizontal Type Tool. Press "T" on the keyboard to quickly select it, or grab it from the Tools palette.

Step 3: Select Your Font From The Options Bar

With the Horizontal Type Tool selected, go up to the Options Bar at the top of the screen and choose your font. Since we're going to be typing a letter and using it as a container for additional text, try to choose a font with thick letters. I'll use Arial Black.

Don't worry about the size for now, we'll resize the text as needed in a moment.

Step 4: Type A Letter Into The Document

Click anywhere inside your Photoshop document and type a letter to use as a container for the rest of your text. I'll type "T" since it's a nice, simply shape.

Step 5: Use Free Transform To Resize The Letter As Needed

If you need to resize your letter, press "Ctrl+T" (Win) or "Command+T" (Mac) to surround the letter with the Free Transform box, and then drag any of the box's control handles to increase the size of your text.

To make sure you keep the width and height of the letter in proportion, hold down the "Shift" key on your keyboard as you drag.

Press "Enter" (Win) or "Return" (Mac) to accept the transformation when you're done.

Step 6: Create A Path From The Type

With the Horizontal Type Tool still selected, right-click (Win) or Option-click (Mac) anywhere inside the document to bring up a sub menu of options for the text. We need to convert our letter into a path which we can use as a container for the rest of our text, so to do that, select "Create Work Path" from the sub menu. Click on it to select it.

Depending on the color you're using for your text, you may or may not notice an outline around the letter once you've created the path, but you'll notice it in a moment.

Step 7: Hide The Type Layer

If you didn't notice the path around your letter after you selected "Create Work Path", you'll notice it after this step because we're going to hide the text layer from view, since we no longer need to see it. On the far left of the text layer in the Layers palette is an eyeball icon. This is the Layer Visibility icon, but most people just refer to it as the "eyeball". When the eyeball is showing, the layer is visible in the document, and when it's not showing, the layer is hidden. Currently, the eyeball is showing, which is why we can see the letter in the document. Click on the eyeball icon with your mouse, which will not only hide the eyeball, it will hide the text in the document as well.

You can click back inside the empty box where the eyeball icon was displayed to make the layer visible again.

With the text hidden, only the path is now visible:

Step 8: Click Inside The Path, But Don't Type Just Yet

We now have our path visible which we're going to use as a container for the rest of our text. All we need to do now is add it.

With the Horizontal Type Tool still selected, move your mouse cursor anywhere inside the path. You'll see the shape of your cursor change from an I-beam with a dotted square around it to an I-beam with a dotted elliptical shape around it, indicating that if you click the mouse and start typing, you'll be typing inside the path, which is exactly what we want.

Go ahead and click anywhere inside the path, but don't start typing just yet.

Step 9: Change Your Font And/Or Font Size If Necessary

You're probably going to want to reduce the size of your font before you start typing, so before you actually type anything, go up to the Options Bar and set your font size to something more appropriate. I'll set mine to 12 pt. You may want to change the font as well. I'll change mine to Arial, rather than Arial Black which is what I used for the letter itself.

Step 10: Select "Justify All" From The Paragraph Palette

There's one more thing we're going to want to do before we start typing. We want to set the text justification to "justify all" so that the text will fill up our shape from left to right. We can access the justification options from the Paragraph palette.

if you don't already have the Paragraph palette open on your screen, go up to the Options Bar and click on the Character and Paragraph palette toggle button, as shown below:

By default, Photoshop groups the Character and Paragraph palettes together in the same palette group, both because they work as a team and to save screen space. If the Character palette is the one showing, simply click on the Paragraph palette's name tab at the top of the palette group to bring it to the forefront and send the Character palette to the background.

With the Paragraph palette selected, click the "Justify All" option in the upper right of the palette. This will make sure that our text fills as much of the letter as possible when we add our text inside of it.

Step 11: Type Inside The Path

All that's left to do now is add our text inside the letter. Go ahead and start typing, and as you do, you'll see your text filling the inside of the letter.

Continue typing until your letter is filled with text.

Step 12: Hide The Path

With the text added, all that's left to do now is hide the path, and we can do that easily with the keyboard shortcut "Ctrl+H" (Win) or "Command+H" (Mac).

And here's the final result, with the text in the shape of a letter T:

And that's how easy it is to convert a letter into a path and use it as a container for more text in Photoshop!

And there we have it!