Simple Pointy Text

Friday… Woooohooooo!! Need I say more?

Out Now

Magazine

 

 

What Digital Camera

 

Great buyer’s guide.
A litle Photosho – This month, faking infra-red 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo360

Electronic Photo magazine that really is worth a read.

Sadly no Photoshop stuff in it as yet.

 

 

 

Simple Pointy Text

In yesterday’s ‘tutorial’ I remarked that “… I’d changed the Type layer into a work path” and have had a few people ask “eh?” “why” and “what?” so I guess I can use that for today’s blog / tutorial thing.

To demonstrate a little more of the function I am thinking of doing something a bit spiky and nasty. So there’s one word that springs to mind.. Crows, nasty spiteful things.

So this is what we are heading towards;

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.First things first, lets type out the word. I’ve chosen an already pointy font to make it a little easier. (Charlemagne Std)

 

 

 

 

 

2.We need our text as a path for this. So lets go to the layer menu and choose Type and then Create Work Path.

You might see a line appear around your text depending on your text colour. Turn off the visibility of your text layer and you’ll see the path more clearly. Leave the visibility off.

 

3.While we’re here, make a new blank layer, we’ll need that in a while.

 

 

 

 

 

4.Skootch over to the tools palette and choose the Direct Selection Tool. A white arrow that might be hiding behind the black arrow (Path selection tool).

 

5.Now comes the good bit, concentrate now…. If you click on the path with this tool little points show. These are Anchor Points and you can move them around individually, which is handy, thats what we want.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here you can see the top of the C, I’m going to move that point up to make a longer thinner point.  (Ctrl/Cmd+z to undo Ctl/Cmd+Alt+z to step back)

 

 

 

 

 

6.Some of the letters, like the W have a point on the point and bringing it down looks a bit weird. But that’s ok, we can add Anchor Points too.

 

 

 

 

 

Right click and choose Add Anchor Point and away we go.

 

 

 

 

7.Once you have the letters as you like them we can position them where we want them, closer together, higher, lower….

 

Over to the tool palette again and this time get the black arrow, the Path Selection Tool. This will select each letter, or path, as a whole.

 

 

 

 

Also not that you can transform them like any other shape too if you want to rotate them. (Ctrl/Cmd+T)

 

 

 

 

 

8. Once you are happy, make the blank layer active and go to the Path pallet (probably grouped with your layer palette) and go right to the bottom. There you’ll find a series of icons. The one we are looking for is the first one on the left “Fill path with foreground color” You can guess what this does. Click it.

 

 

And there we are, not forgetting that we can do what we like to the layer now, just like any other. I added an inner glow set to multiply and black and remover the black in the blending mode.