Photoshop Tutorial : Warping Type

It’s easy to add a bit of flair to your text using the Warp dialog box. Warping lets you distort type into a wide range of shapes, such as a flag, a wave or a fisheye. The warp style you select is an attribute of the type layer - you can change a layer’s warp style at any time to change the overall shape of the warp.

1. Open a new file or open an existing image file that you want to add some text to. I’m using an image of some running legs.

2. Select the Horizontal Type tool (), and in the Character palette, choose Century as the typeface, 72 pt as the size and white as the colour. (make sure you don’t have a white background or you won’t see your text!)

3. Click anywhere on the image and type some text. Then click the Commit Any Current Edits button () on the tool options bar.

The words appear on the image and a new layer appears in the Layers palette. The new layer will be name whatever you typed in. In this example, I typed the word Running, so the new layer is automatically called Running.

4. Click on your new text layer in the Layers palette to make sure it is selected and then click on the Create Warp Text button on the tool options bar.

The Warp Text dialog box opens.

5. In the Warp Text dialog box, choose Style > Flag and click the Horizontal radio button. For Bend , specify + 25%. Then click OK.

The words you typed will appear to ruffle like a flag in the wind. Easy as that!

I repeated steps 4 and 5 with the words “Away” layer, to create the image below:

Free Photoshop Brushes : Fish

Some more free Photoshop brushes for your photoshopping pleasure. These brushes all feature fish or underwater animals like seahorses.



You can download the zipped file here.

Let me know if you find them useful.

Photoshop Tutorial : A visual overview of the toolbox

Just like an artist’s work table, the toolbox - the long, narrow palette on the far left side of the work area in Photoshop - contains the tools you'll use to draw, paint, erase, and do a myriad of other things whilst working on your image. There are several distinct categories of tools in Photoshop's toolbox:

• Selection tools

• Painting and editing tools

• Vector drawing and Text tools

• Foreground and background colour selection boxes

• Viewing tools

When you let your mouse hover over any tool in the toolbox, you will see a tooltip which lets you know the name of the tool and the tool's keyboard shortcut. It's worth making a concious effort to learn the shortcuts as it speeds up your work enormously. Some of the shortcuts are really easy to remember such as Z for the Zoom tool or E for the Eraser.

Whenever you see a little arrow on the bottom right of a tool in Photoshop (or any Adobe application for that matter), it means there are other “hidden” tool choices. Hidden tools are accessed by clicking and holding on any tool that contains a small black triangle, located in the lower-right corner of the tool. It can sometimes be hard to find that one tool you're looking for because it's hidden under a fly-out menu icon.

The illustrations below show an overview of the toolbox, with each tool available and its shortcut key

Selection Tools


Retouching Tools

Painting Tools

Vector drawing and Text Tools



Annotation, Measuring and Navigation Tools

Colour Tools

Other Tools