Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Warping Text

With Elements, you can warp the shape of your text in all sorts of fun ways. You can make it wave like a flag, bulge out, twist like a fish, arc up or down, and lots more. These complex effects are really easy, too, and best of all, you can still edit the text once you've applied these effects. Figure 14-6 shows just a few examples of what you can do. If you add a Layer style (explained on Adding Layer Styles) too, warping is even more effective.

To warp text, follow these steps:

1. Enter some text.

   Use the Move tool (The Move tool) to reposition the text, if necessary.

2. Select the text you want to warp.

   Make sure the Text layer is the active layer, or you won't be able to select what you typed. Click the Text layer in the Layers panel if it's not already highlighted there.

3. Click the Create Warped Text button in the Options bar.

   The Type tool has to be active for the Create Warped Text button (the T with a curved line under it) to appear. The Warp Text dialog box, shown in Figure 14-7, appears.

   

   Figure 14-6. Elements gives you oodles of ways to warp your text. Here are just a few of the basic warps, applied using their standard settings. Clockwise from the upper left: Inflate, Fish, Rise, and Flag. You can tweak these effects endlessly using the sliders in the Warp dialog box. (These examples also have Layer styles applied to them.)

   Figure 14-7. As you can see, you have lots of ways ...