PSC14: Text In Circles

Today I'll show you how easy it is in Photoshop to get text to flow around a circle or around virtually any sort of path.

The Path

Of course, in order for this to work, we need to create a path first. There are several ways to create a path in Photoshop, one of them would be to select any of your normal shape tools, such as the Ellipse Tool or the Rectangle Tool, then in the tool bar for this shape, click the Paths icon, that's the middle one of the three icons that are located on the left side, and just draw the shape.

In case of today's tutorial, I'm using a different method, which leads to the same result.

Creating the Path

I'm drawing a round selection with the Elliptical Marquee tool, then I right click on the new selection, and choose Make Work Path from the popup menu.

This will result in a new path to be created that you can then continue to use.

The Path

The Text

Now that you have a path, it's easyto get the text to flow along it. Select the Type Tool by clicking the T in the tool box and hover it over the path. Once you see the text cursor change to something with a little line through it, click, and you are set to start typing.

The Text

Changing The Text

Selecting Curved Text

Now the cool thing about this text is that you can always change it. It's fully editable, just select the text tool again, click on the text, and select it as you would usually do. You can also change the size of the text and everything else about it.

Weird Shaped Paths

Weird Shapes

Of course, this is not limited to circular paths, basically you can flow text along any shape that you can come up with. And we will look into creating paths with the Pen Tool in one of the next Photoshop Corners.