Setting text inside a custom path

In this movie, I'll show you how to place text inside of a custom container, because the idea is we want the text to actually ride along the contours of the model's arm. I still have my Text tool selected. So I'll click inside the word make in order to enter that blinking insertion marker. And then I'll select all the text inside the frame by pressing Ctrl+A, or Cmd+A on the Mac. Next, I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose the Copy command, or press Ctrl+C or Cmd+C. And now, I'll press the Escape key in order to escape out of the text entry mode.

We don't need this layer anymore, so I'll just go ahead and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it. Now what I'd like you to do is switch over to the Paths panel. And you can switch to it by clicking on the Paths tab, by default here in the Layers panel group. Or, if you prefer you can go up to the Window menu, and choose the Paths command. Either way, you'll see a couple of paths that I've drawn in advance for you. Go ahead and click on the Container Path in order to make it active. And now I'm going to zoom in on my image like so, so that we can see it up close and personal.

And notice what we have is a path outline. Now, I went ahead and drew this outline using the Pen tool, by the way, and the Pen tool is a very powerful tool inside of Photoshop. I'll be devoting an entire chapter to that tool in the advanced course of this series. But for now just know that it's a vector-based path outline that you can do just about anything with. You can select the image with it, you can paint a brush stroke around it, and you can create text inside of it as well. So, still armed with the Type tool, go ahead and move your cursor into that path outline and you'll see and I beam surrounded by a dotted circle. And that tells you that you're going to create text inside of this object. So just go ahead and Click inside of there in order to set the blinking insertion marker. And for me, it's appearing over here in the right hand side. And then you can enter text from the keyboard, and that text is going to automatically appear inside the path outline. Now, some of my words are too long to fit properly. If I were to enter a space character right about there, and here as well, then my text would jump upward, as you can see. I don't want this text of course, so I'll press Ctrl+A or Cmd+A on the Mac to select it. And then I'll replace it by going up to the Edit menu and choosing the Paste command. Or I could press Ctrl+V, or Cmd+V on a Mac, and the text automatically pastes inside of that path outline. Now the reason the word make is dropping down to a second line is because it's too big to fit on the first line. If I were to click between the k and the e and press the spacebar, then you would see that the word Mak would go ahead and wrap up to that top line. Anyway, we don't want it to. We want it to be where it is, so I'll get rid of that space character. And then I'll press Ctrl+A, or Cmd+A on the Mac, in order to select all of that text. And I'll make it flush right by pressing Ctrl+Shift+R, or Cmd+Shift+R on the Mac, and that's all there is to it. So now I'll press the Escape key, or the Enter key on the numerical keypad, to create that new text layer. So you can see, if we switch over to the Layers panel, we do have a new text layer, so that text is reinstated on an independent layer. Meanwhile, as long as that layer is selected, we can see its outline here inside the Paths panel and it's indicated by this guy right there, in italics. Which tells us that it's a kind of temporary path outline. We'll only see it here in the Paths panel as long as this particular layer is selected. And so, if at any time you wanted to modify this custom container, then you would modify this path here, not the original container path.

And you would do so, just so as you know, by switching down to this Black Arrow tool, the one that Photoshop calls the Path Selection tool. You would click and hold on it and switch to the Direct Selection tool. And you would click, for example, on the segment right here in order to make it active, and then you could drag these points around if you wanted to. And you could make that top line longer by Shift dragging this top handle like so, and that would allow the word Make to fit. I don't want to do that however. So I'll press Ctrl+Alt+Z or Cmd+Opt+Z on the Mac, couple of times in a row in order to undo the movement of those two anchor points.

And again, I'll explain in detail how to work with path outlines in a future chapter, but for now there's a couple of more modifications I want to make to the text. First of all, I'll press T to switch back to the Text tool. I want the 5 to wrap down to the next line, so I'm going to go ahead and click and drag over 5 minutes like so, in order to select it. And then I'll press Ctrl+T, or Cmd+T on a Mac, to bring up the Character panel. And I'll click in the Flyout menu icon in the upper right corner, and I'll choose this command, No Break.

And that'll go ahead and keep those two words together, while maintaining all of this text here as a single paragraph. All right, now I'll press the Enter key on the numerical keypad in order to accept that change. And I'm going to go ahead and zoom out here, so that I can see both of my paragraphs of text. And I want the kerning to be a little different, so I'll switch back to my Layers panel and I'll Shift-click on New Miracle Diet, so that both of these paragraphs are selected. And with my Character panel still open, I'll go ahead and click the down pointing arrowhead next to the word metrics, and I'll switch it to Optical.

And that gives me what appears to me at any rate to be better character spacing. All right, that takes care of those teasers. And in fact, I think I'll go ahead and place these two layers in a single group by pressing Ctrl+G, or Cmd+G on a Mac, to group those two layers together. And I'll double-click on the name of the group and I'll change its name to Teasers, because these are in fact the teasers that invite you to buy the magazine. So that's how you go about creating text inside of a custom path container, here inside Photoshop. In the next movie, I'll show you how to create text along a path.