Smarter Texting –Transforming Editable Text

TipSquirrel welcomes back  Rebecca Fryer

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This a quick tip to help you achieve editable transformed text

To begin with create some Text in my example I used Cooper Black font as it looks like the kind of font you would find of a can of soda, the soda can 3D object is just to demonstrate a difficult surface to wrap text onto but could be any object.

Transforming Text – The Problems

As you may have already discovered transforming a Live Text Layer is problematic. (What I mean by ‘live’ is retaining its ability to edit the Text after the Transformation)

As you can see in the above example the Warp function of the Transform Tool is ghosted and when you click any of the Anchor Points on the Transform Bounding Box it only allows you to Skew, Rotate and Resize the Text Layer. This is frustrating and very limiting.

So what are the options?

Well you could right mouse click on the Text Layer and Rasterize the Text Layer, however you gain the ability to Warp the Text any way you wish but you lose the editability of the text. Alternatively you might choose to use ‘Convert to Shape’ or ‘Create Work Path’ from the Text Layer and transform the paths instead – however you will still lose the ability to edit the actual text after converting it.

Another thing to watch for is the an error warning regarding any text that has a faux bold style

Transforming Text – The Solution

Ok so we have seen the limitation of transforming text and retaining its editability so what is the solution?

Converting the Text Layer into a Smart Object will allow it to be fully Transformable and retain its Text Layer for changes post-transformation.

Firstly ensure you have the Text Layer selected in the Layer Palette and choose Layer > Smart Object > Convert to Smart Object. Then we can use the Transform Tools (Ctrl)+(T) to transform the text.

Note that now we can access the Free Transform Warp tools and use any of the presets, custom Warp, Perspective transforms or a combination of any of them to create the text in any shape we put our minds to.

Of course the best part of converting the text to a Smart Object is that we retain text editability.

Double click on the Smart Object text layer in the Layer Palette will open up the Smart Object in its own Document window and in the Layer Palette is your original Text Layer for you to click on and edit as you see fit.

Once you have changed the text close the Smart Object document and you will be prompted to save the changes – Click yes and you will be returned to your original Transformation document and the text will have updated to include the new edit.

You can change Transformations and edit the text as many times as you feel fit which is the beauty of use a Smart Object also you can use Layer/Vector masks, any of the Layer Styles or even Filters directly on the Smart Object making it extremely versatile.

Have Fun with Smarter Texting.

Rebecca Fryer