Working with Text (part 3) – Shaped Text Blocks in Photoshop

Hi, fellow digiscrappers! I don’t know about you, but I can hardly believe that it’s November already! Somehow I always seem to miss decorating for Thanksgiving. I think I’ll decorate the house today before things get really crazy with holiday preparations. First, though, I’m going to answer a reader question from two weeks ago. On my layout, I had journaling in the shape of a circle and I was asked how I got it into that shape. On that particular layout, the template I used had a circular text path so all I had to do was replace the sample text with my journaling. Today I’m going to show you how to make your journaling fit any shape. I opened up PS and made a new document with a paper and journaling block from Autumn Fun – Give Thanks, and I’m going to make the text fit the shape of the journaling block. Please note that this will only work in Adobe Photoshop, not Photoshop Elements.

The first thing I do is to make a new layer that will become the text layer. Next, I select the shape of the journaling block by holding down the Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) key and clicking on the thumbnail image of the journaling block in the layers pallette. You can see that I now have “marching ants” around the outside of the journaling block.

Since I don’t want the text to extend all the way to the outside of the journaling block, the next thing I’m going to do is to make the selection a bit smaller. To do this, I’ll click on Select > Modify > Contract. When the dialog comes up asking how much I want to contract, I’ll choose 30 pixels to get the selection just inside the orange border on the journaling block. This is how to get to “contract” in the menu:

And this is what the selection looks like after it’s contracted by 30 pixels:

The final steps are to make the selection into a path and fill the path with text. To make the selection into a path, select the paths pallette by clicking on the “paths” tab and then click on the little button on the bottom that kind of looks like a girl’s face with braids. That’s the “make path from selection” button. This is what it looks like after I clicked that button:

You can see that there’s now a solid line where the marching ants used to be. Finally, select the text tool, click inside of the new path, and add your text.

I find it very useful to be able to make custom journaling blocks to fit elements. You can also use the custom shape tool and make journaling blocks in all sorts of shapes!