Adobe Photoshop Tips and Tricks

Adobe Photoshop Tips, Tricks And F.A.Q.s

Cool Photoshop Tricks, Timesaving Tips and Answers to Frequently Asked Questions

In this Photoshop Tips and Tricks tutorial, we're going to learn how to save and reuse text as a custom shape. Let's say you've created a simple logo by arranging some text and then applying Photoshop's Warp Text command to it, as I'll do in a moment. Since you'll be using this text as a logo, chances are you'll need to use it more than once, but you don't want to have to recreate it every time you need it. Wouldn't it be great if you could just save the logo somehow and then access it whenever you want? Fortunately, there is a way to do just that, and as we'll see, it's very easy to do.

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Step 1: Create Your Logo

Before we can save our logo, we need to create it, so let's do that. I'm going to create a very simple logo here for this tutorial, and I've already gone ahead and added my text to my document, as we can see below:

Text added in my Photoshop document.
Add your text and arrange it in the document.

I'm going to apply a simple warp to the text to add a little interest to it. With my Type Tool still selected, I'm going to go up to the Options Bar at the top of the screen and click on the Warp Text icon:

Clicking the 'Warp Text' icon in Photoshop's Options Bar.
With your Type Tool selected, click on the Warp Text icon in the Options Bar.

This brings up the "Warp Text" dialog box where I can choose from some preset text warp "styles" (effects). By default, the Style option is set to "None", but I'm going to click on the down-pointing arrow to the right of the word "None" and select Wave from the list:

Selecting the 'Wave' text warp style in Photoshop's Warp Text dialog box.
Selecting the "Wave" text warp style.

This gives me a "wave" effect with my text:

The text after applying the default 'Wave' warp style to it.
The text after applying the default "Wave" warp style to it.

I'm just going to click on the Bend slider and drag it to the left to flip the wave horizontally:

Dragging the 'Bend' option slider to the left to flip the wave horizontally.
You can drag the sliders for the various options to alter the default appearance of each of the preset Styles.

Here's what my text now looks like after flipping the wave horizontally:

The text after flipping the wave effect horizontally.
The text wafer flipping the Wave effect.

I'm going to use this now as my fictional logo, and even though it didn't take me a whole lot of time or effort to create it, I still don't want to have to recreate it every time I need to use it, so I'm going to save it as a custom shape, which I'll do next.

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