Adobe Photoshop Tutorials: Faking Text Wrap In Photoshop

Step 4: Select The Ellipse Tool

There's a few ways that we can reshape a path in Photoshop, but in this case the easiest way, since the ball is round, is to use Photoshop's Ellipse Tool to subtract part of the path from around the ball. To do that, I'll select my Ellipse Tool, which by default is hiding behind the Rectangle Tool in the Tools palette, so I'll need to click on the Rectangle Tool, hold my mouse button down for a second or two, and then select the Ellipse Tool from the fly out menu that appears:

Step 5: Set The Ellipse Tool To "Subtract" Mode

With the Ellipse Tool selected, if you look up in the Options Bar, you'll see a group of four icons that look like squares connected together in different ways. These four icons represent four options that determine how the path you're about to draw is going to behave. The one we want is the second one from the left, which is the Subtract from path area icon. I'll click on it to select it:

With this option selected, if I drag out an elliptical-shaped path with the Ellipse Tool, which I'll do in a moment, any part of the new path that overlaps my original rectangular path will be subtracted from the original path. Let's see what I mean. I'm going to drag out an elliptical path around the baseball. Before I begin, if I look closely at my cursor, I can see a small minus sign ("-") in the bottom right corner of it, letting me know that I'm in "Subtract" mode:

You can also access the "Subtract" mode simply by holding down your Alt (Win) / Option key before you start dragging out your path, which is a bit faster than selecting the option in the Options Bar (you can release the Alt/Option key right after you begin dragging out your path). I'll go ahead and drag out a path around the baseball. If I need to reposition my path as I'm dragging, which I almost always need to do, I can hold down my Spacebar and move the path around on the screen with my mouse to reposition it, then release the Spacebar and continue dragging out the path. Here's the image with the second path around the baseball:

It looks like I have two separate paths in the image at this point - a rectangular one and an elliptical one. But the only active path is the original rectangular one, which now isn't quite as rectangular because, even though Photoshop isn't giving us any visual clues of what's really happening, the elliptical path is now subtracting (or "cutting out", if you prefer) part of the rectangular path around the baseball. To make it easier to see, I've filled in the remaining active path area in the image below. This is the area where my text will appear. Notice how the rectangular path now wraps nicely around the baseball, which means my text is also going to wrap around it:

Now that we have our path in place, let's add our text.