Photoshop Text Wrap - Faking Text Wrap In Photoshop
Learn Photoshop with Text Effects Tutorials at Photoshop Essentials.com
Written By Steve Patterson, Photoshop Essentials.com
In this Photoshop tutorial, we're going to learn how to create a Photoshop text wrap effect by faking the text wrap feature you'd normally find in a page layout program, allowing us to wrap text around objects. Photoshop may be the world's most popular and most powerful image editor, but it doesn't quite measure up with programs like InDesign or even Illustrator when it comes to text (although Photoshop does offer more text-related options than you'd normally expect to find in a program built for photo editing). Photoshop doesn't come with an actual text wrap feature, but it does give us the ability to use a path as a container for our text, and as we'll learn in this tutorial, we can use that to wrap text around objects. It's not quite as good or as intuitive as having an actual text wrap feature, but it works.
Here I have an image of a baseball lying in the grass:
I want to add some text to this image, and I want the text to wrap around the baseball. As I said, Photoshop doesn't come with an official "text wrap" option, but thanks to paths and Photoshop's ability to use a path as a container for text, this is going to be easy.
Let's get started.
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Step 1: Select The Rectangle Tool
Since we're going to use a path as a container for our text, before we can add our text, we need a path! I'm going to use Photoshop's Rectangle Tool (not to be confused with the Rectangular Marquee Tool) to create a rectangular path, which will become the basic shape of my text container. I'll select the Rectangle Tool from the Tools palette:
I could also press U on my keyboard to quickly select it.
Step 2: Select The "Paths" Option In The Options Bar
Photoshop gives us three ways to use the Rectangle Tool, along with its other shape tools. We can use them to draw vector shapes, we can use them to draw simple paths (which is what we'll be doing here), and we can use them to draw pixel-based shapes. You choose between these three options by clicking on their corresponding icon up in the Options Bar at the top of the screen. I want to use the Rectangle Tool to draw a rectangular-shaped path, so I'm going to click on the Paths icon in the Options Bar, which is the icon in the middle of the three (the one on the left is the vector shapes option and the one on the right is for drawing pixel-based shapes):
Step 3: Drag Out A Rectangular-Shaped Path
With my Rectangle Tool selected and set to draw paths, I'm simply going to drag out a rectangular-shaped path, in the same way that I would drag out a selection with the Rectangular Marquee Tool, and this path will become the container for my text:
As we can see in the image above, my path is currently running straight through the baseball, which isn't going to help me much when what I really want is for my text to wrap around the right side of the baseball, not flow over top of it. I need a way to reshape my path so that the path itself wraps around the ball. We'll do that next.
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