One commonly-cited (and totally false) weakness of Photoshop is that it has no effective text layout capacities.

If you need a dynamic way to wrap or curve a line or whole blocks of text, Photoshop is perfectly capable of catering to your every need. A seemingly uncommon demand for a raster-based image application, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used the following techniques.

They all center around paths, a vector-based function; text entered into Photoshop is also vector-based. Paths are essentially ways to establish a boundary that some action can be applied to. Most often, its used for masking or shape fills. Today, we’ll be using it to fill with text!

Since it’s October already, let’s try to get some text to wrap around a pumpkin–the end result will look something like this:

First, you’ll want to have your pen tool activated, with the “paths” option, “rectangle” function, and “add” option all selected:

Now, draw a rectangle in the area you want the text to appear in, overlapping the part you don’t want it to include. We’ll cut that area out in a sec:

Now, here’s the key: we want to get rid of the portion that’s overlapping. You can use the oval tool, or the pen tool to create an arc to your liking. BUT be sure you now have the “subtract” option selected:

Now comes the insertion of text. I find it most useful to type up my text in TextEdit/Notepad and paste it in. Have the text tool active, and click in the box path: you’ll notice it turns into the usual “I” shape, but with a dotted circle around it. Go ahead and paste or type your text. You’ll wind up with this:

On a Mac, “Command-Enter/return” will set your changes. The awesome thing is the path is also set, and you can resize the path like you would a regular text box, only it’ll retain the area you cut out!

Now, let’s do a single line of text, curving around the top and above the text we just added. This is easier to do. With the pen tool selected, draw a multi-point arc around the object:

Now, with the text tool, hover over the very beginning point of your arc, and click. You’ll notice, again, that it has that dotted circle around the I. Now type in or paste in your text. “Command-Enter/Return” will set the edit. If you wind up getting a selection active after, just deselect. You’ll wind up with this:

Now, you’ve got the text placed! You’ll notice that at the pivot point, things can get a little cramped, so if you so desire, you can do two paths, one for each word. Each path itself can be as wavy or angular as you like–customization is endless.

The final result, after some editing: