Photoshop Type - Creating Warped Text

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Summary: Learn how Photoshop's Warp Text options make it easy to twist, stretch and distort type while keeping the text and the effect itself fully editable!

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photoshop Basicstutorials.

In this Photoshop Type tutorial, we'll look at Photoshop's built-in Warp Text options and how they make it easy to twist, stretch and distort type into all kinds of interesting shapes, all while keeping our type, as well as the warping effect itself, completely editable!

The Warp Text options have been around for quite a while now, first introduced way back in Photoshop 6, and while the results we get from them may not have the same wow factor as many of the more advanced text effects out there, they do offer some important and impressive advantages. First, no matter which warping option we choose, the text itself remains 100% live, editable type, which means we can go back and edit the text whenever we need to. That's a huge advantage over most of the more advanced text effects we can create since they usually force us to convert our text into either pixels or vector shapes, at which point we lose the ability to edit the text.

Another advantage with the Warp Text options is that the warping effects themselves also remain 100% fully editable. Nothing we do with them permanently changes the look of our type. Photoshop simply remembers the settings we used and essentially shows us a live preview of what those settings look like. We can go back at any time and change any of the settings. We can also switch to a completely different warping option, or we can turn the warp options off and switch back to the normal text, all without any loss of image quality.

Finally, while many advanced text effects require lots of time and effort, not to mention some advanced skills, Photoshop's Warp Text options are fast and easy to use, even for beginners!

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To use the Warp Text options, we first need to add some text to our document. Here's a simple design I have open on my screen with some text added in front of a background image:

The original design.

If we look in my Layers panel, we see that my document contains two layers, with my Type layer sitting above the image on the Background layer:

The Layers panel showing the Type layer above the Background layer.

Notice that my Type layer is selected (highlighted in blue) in the Layers panel. We need to have the Type layer selected before we can apply any of the Warp Text options to it. We also need to have the Type Tool selected, so I'll grab it from the Tools panel:

Selecting the Type Tool from the Tools panel.

Choosing A Warp Style

With the Type Tool in hand and the Type layer selected in the Layers panel, click on the Warp Text option in the Options Bar. It's the icon that looks like a letter T with a curved line below it:

Clicking on the Warp Text option in the Options Bar.

This opens Photoshop's Warp Text dialog box where we can choose which warping option we want to apply. Photoshop refers to the various warping options as styles, but by default, the Style option at the very top of the dialog box is set toNone, which is why nothing has happened yet to our text:

The Warp Text dialog box.

If we click on the word "None", we open a list of all the different warp styles we can choose from. There's 15 of them in total. If you've used Adobe Illustrator, these text warping options may look familiar since they're the exact same ones found in Illustrator. We won't go through all of them here since you can easily experiment with them on your own, but as an example, I'll choose the first style in the list, Arc:

Selecting the Arc style from the top of the list.

As soon as I select a style, Photoshop applies it to my text in the document, giving me an instant preview of what the effect looks like:

Photoshop shows us a live preview of the result in the document.

Adjusting The Warp With The Bend Option

Once we've chosen a style, we can adjust the intensity of the warping effect using the Bend option. By default, the Bend value is set to 50% but we can easily adjust it by dragging the slider left or right. I'll drag the slider towards the left to lower my Bend amount down to 25%:

Lowering the Bend value for the Arc style to 25%.

And now we can see in the document that the warping effect has less "bend" to it:

The warping effect has been reduced after lowering the Bend value.

If we continue dragging the Bend slider towards the left, past the mid-way point, we'll move into the negative percentage values. I'll drag my Bend value to -25%:

Dragging the Bend slider into the negative values.

This changes the shape of the bend from positive to negative so that the text now arcs downward instead of up:

The text now arcs downward with a negative Bend value.

The Horizontal And Vertical Options

If you look directly above the Bend option in the Warp Text dialog box, you'll find two more options that control the direction of the warp, Horizontal and Vertical. The Horizontal option is selected for us by default and it's usually the one you'll want to use, but we can also have our text warp vertically. I'll choose the Vertical option:

Selecting the Vertical option.

With Vertical selected, my text now warps from left to right rather than up or down. It's interesting, but not really what I want for this particular design. In most cases, you'll want to leave the direction set to Horizontal:

The Arc style now warps the text from left to right with Vertical selected.

Next, we'll look at Horizontal Distortion and Vertical Distortion, two interesting but potentially confusing options that have nothing at all to do with your chosen warp style.