Photoshop Text Effects: Wrapping Text in 3D

Step 4: Select The Type Tool

Switch back over to your Layers palette at this point. It's time to add our text. For that, we need to use Photoshop's Type Tool, so either select if from the Tools palette or press the letter T on your keyboard:

With the Type Tool selected, go up to the Options Bar at the top of the screen and select your font and font size. This 3D effect works best if you use a font with thick letters, so I'm going to choose Helvetica Black as my font. You can choose whichever font you like from the ones you have installed on your system, but again, try to pick one with nice thick letters, and also one that's easily readable. You'll need to experiment with the size of your font, since it will depend a lot on the size of the object you're wrapping your text around and even more so on the size and resolution of the image you're using. I'm using a 14pt font size for this tutorial, but again, you'll need to experiment on your own with your image:

Step 5: Choose A Color For Your Text

While you're up in the Options Bar, let's choose a color for our text. To do that, click on the color swatch:

This brings up Photoshop's Color Picker where you can choose whichever color you like for your text. I'm going to choose a bright yellowish-orange color, which should stand out nicely against the mostly blue planet as well as the black background:

Click OK once you've chosen your color to exit out of the dialog box.

Step 6: Type Your Text Along The Circular Path

With our font, font size and text color selected, we can add our text, and we want to add it so that it follows along the circular path we've created. To do that, move your mouse cursor over the part of the path where you want to begin typing. I'm going to start my text somewhere along the top of the path. As you move your mouse cursor over the path, you'll notice that the cursor changes from having a dotted square around it to a squiggly line running through it. That squiggly line tells you that you're about to type directly on the path and that your text will follow along the shape of the path, which is exactly what we want. To add your type, simply click on the path and begin typing. The effect will work best if you use all capital letters. I'm going to type "WELCOME TO PLANET EARTH":

Since I want my text to appear to fully wrap around the planet, I'm going to type the exact same sentence again at the end of it:

If you look closely, you can see that I've run into a small problem. There isn't enough space along my path to fit in all my text, and the word "EARTH" in the top left has been cut off. To fix that, I'm going to double-click directly on the type layer's thumbnail in the Layers palette, which is going to tell Photoshop to select all of my text at once:

My text will appear highlighted in white in my image. Then, with my text selected, I'm going to hold down my Alt (Win) / Option key and press the left arrow key on my keyboard a couple of times to close up the space between the letters until there's enough room to fit in all of my text and the word "EARTH" appears:

To space both sentences an equal distance apart and close up that large gap at the top, I'm going to click my mouse between the two sentences at the bottom (between the words "EARTH" and "WELCOME" ) and again holding down Alt (Win) / Option (Mac), I'm going to press my left bracket key a few times to add a little extra space between the two words until the text looks equally balanced all along the path.

When I'm happy with the spacing of my text, I'm going to press Ctrl+H (Win) / Command+H (Mac) to hide the path from view, leaving me with just my planet and my text circled and nicely spaced around it:

Our text is now circling around the planet but it looks very much two-dimensional and not very interesting. We're going to bring it into the third dimension next.