Elements lets you 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, or arc up or down, among other things. These complex effects are really easy, too, and best of all, you can still edit the text once you’ve applied them. 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.
Note
Warping text is easy to do, but it’s also a bit limited. You can control the amount of warp for the style you choose, but you can’t just create a freeform style of your own. The section Artistic Text (page 495) has information about new Elements text tools that give you much more flexibility than warping does.
Figure 14-6. Elements gives you oodles of ways to warp text. Here are some of the basic warps, applied using their standard settings. Clockwise from the upper left, they are: 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.)
To warp text, follow these steps:
Enter some text.
Use the Move tool to reposition the text, if necessary.
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.
Click the Options bar’s Create Warped Text button.
Make sure the Type tool is active or you won’t see this button (the T with a curved line under it). When you click it, the Warp Text dialog box, shown in Figure 14-7, appears.
Tell Elements how to warp the text.
Select a warp from the Style drop-down list. Next, make any changes you want to the sliders or the horizontal/vertical orientation of the warp (your options are described in more detail in a moment). Tweaking these settings can radically alter the warp’s effect. Drag the sliders around to experiment, and watch your image to see the results.
When you come up with something you like, click OK.
Note
You can’t warp text that has the Faux Bold style applied to it (you can warp all the other styles to your heart’s content). If you forget and try to do so, Elements politely reminds you. The program even offers to remove the style and continue with your warp.
Elements gives you lots of different warp styles to choose from, and you can customize each one using the settings in the Warp Text dialog box. The settings are pretty straightforward:
Style. This is where you choose from among all the warping patterns, like Arc, Flag, and so on. To help you select, Elements includes thumbnails in the list that show the general shape of each warp.
Horizontal/Vertical. These radio buttons control the orientation of the warp. Most of the time, you’ll want to leave the button the same as the text’s orientation, but you can get interesting effects by warping the opposite way. A vertical warp on horizontal text gives more of a perspective effect, like the text is moving toward you or away from you. And you can get some really funky effects by putting a horizontal warp on vertical text.
Bend. This is where you tell Elements how much of an arc you want, if you’d like to change it from Element’s standard setting. Just type a percentage in the box or move the slider.
Horizontal/Vertical Distortion. These settings control how much the text warps in the horizontal or vertical plane. They give you precise control over just how and where the text warps. They work pretty much the same way as the Bend setting: type in a negative or positive percentage or move the sliders.
The best way to find the look you want is to experiment. It’s lots of fun, especially if you apply a Layer style first to give your text a 3-D look before warping it.
Tip
Many of the warps look best on two lines of text, so that the lines bend in opposite directions. However, you can also get really interesting effects by putting two lines of text on separate layers and applying different warps to each.
To edit a warp after you apply it, double-click the Text layer’s Warp icon in the Layers panel (it’s a T with a curved line under it). Doing that automatically makes the Text layer active and highlights the text on it. Then, in the Options bar, click the Create Warped Text button to open the Warp Text dialog box showing your current settings. Make any changes you want or set the style to None to unwarp the text.