Creating Distorted Text in Photoshop (2023)

Written by Steve Patterson.

DarinPhotoshop-TypTutorial, let's take a look at the built-in Photoshopdistort textOptions and how they make it easy to rotate, stretch and distort the text in all sorts of interesting ways while keeping our text and the warp effect itself fully editable!

Warp text options have been around for a while, first introduced 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, they do offer some important and impressive benefits .

First, no matter what warp option we choose, the text itself remains 100% live, type-editable, meaning we can go back and edit the text whenever we want. This is a great advantage over most of the more advanced text effects that we can create, since they often force us to convert our text into pixels or vector shapes, making us lose the ability to edit the text.

Another benefit of the warp text options is that the warping effects themselves remain 100% fully editable as well. Nothing we do with them permanently changes the look of our species. Photoshop simply remembers the settings we use and basically shows us a live preview of what those settings look like. We can always go back and change any settings. We can also switch to a completely different warp option, or turn off the warp options and return to normal text, all with no loss of image quality. While many advanced text effects require a lot of time and effort, not to mention some advanced skill, Photoshop's warp text options are quick and easy to use, even for a beginner!

In order to use the Warp Text options, we first need to add some text to our document. Here's a simple theme I opened up on my screen with some text in front of a background image:

The original project.

If we look into my layers panel we can see that my document contains two layers with my text layer positioned above the image in the background layer:

The Layers panel with the text layer on top of the background layer.

Notice that my text layer is selected (highlighted in blue) in the Layers panel. We need to have the text layer selected before we can apply any of the warp text options to it. We must have tooEnter toolselected, so I grab it from the tools window:

Selecting the Text 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 thedistort textoption in the options bar. It's the icon that looks like a letter T with a curved line underneath it:

By clicking the Warp Text option in the options bar.

This will open Photoshop's Warp Text dialog box, where we can choose which warp option we want to apply. Photoshop refers to the various warp options as styles, but by default they areStyleThe option at the top of the dialog box is set tonone, which is why nothing has happened to our text yet:

The Warp Text dialog box.

If we click on the word "None" we will open a list with all the different distortion styles that we can choose from. There are 15 of them in total. If you've used Adobe Illustrator before, these text curvature options may look familiar, as they are exactly the same as those in Illustrator. We won't go through all of them here as you can easily try them yourself, but as an example I'll choose the first style from the list,See:

Selecting the arch style at the top of the list.

Once I choose a style, Photoshop applies it to my text in the document, giving me an instant preview of what the effect will look like:

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

Adjusting the distortion with the Bend option

After choosing a style, you can adjust the intensity of the warping effect withTo bendPossibility. By default, the Bend value is set to 50%, but we can easily adjust it by dragging the slider left or right. I drag the slider to the left to lower the Bend value to 25%:

Decrease the bend value for the arch style to 25%.

And now we can see in the document that the warp effect has less "bend":

The warp effect was reduced after decreasing the bend value.

If we drag the Bend slider further to the left, past the midpoint, we move to negative percentage values. I'll pull my Bend value down to -25%:

Dragging the Bend slider to negative values.

This changes the shape of the fold from positive to negative, so the text now curves down instead of up:

The text is now bent down with a negative Bend value.

The horizontal and vertical options

If you look just above the Bend option in the Warp Text dialog, you'll find two other options that control the direction of the warp.HorizontaleVertical🇧🇷 The horizontal option is selected for us by default and is usually the one you want to use, but we can also have our text distorted vertically. I choose the vertical option:

Selecting the Vertical option.

When Vertical is selected, my text now slants left to right instead of up or down. It's interesting, but not exactly what I want for this particular project. In most cases, you should leave the Direction set to Horizontal:

The Arc style now skews text from left to right when Vertical is selected.

Then we'll look at horizontal warp and vertical warp, two interesting but potentially confusing options that have nothing to do with the warp style you choose.

Horizontal and vertical distortion

There are two more options in the bottom half of the Warp Text dialog -horizontal distortionevertical distortion🇧🇷 These two options can be a bit confusing because while the bend value controls the strength of the bend style chosen, the horizontal and vertical warp options are completely independent effects. What makes it confusing is that Photoshop forces us to choose a style in the style option before giving us access to the horizontal and vertical distortion sliders, but the distortion effects have nothing to do with the style we choose, and in fact we can use these sliders even if we effectively turn off the distortion style.

To show you what I mean, I'll leave my Warp style set to Arc, but I'll set my Bend value to 0% by dragging the slider to the middle:

Leave Arc selected, but set the Bend value to 0%.

Although I've chosen Arc as my warp style and Bend is set to 0%, the style currently has no effect on my text since no bends are applied:

A Bend value of 0% effectively disables the style.

I drag the horizontal distortion slider to the right to set the value to around 80%:

Increase horizontal distortion to 80%.

This creates a 3D perspective effect, as if the text is approaching from left to right, but is actually just squeezing the letters to the left and stretching to the right. If you're trying to create a true perspective effect, you'll get better results using Photoshop's Free Transform command:

The result of horizontally distorting text.

As with the Bend option, we can also set the Horizontal or Vertical Distortion options to negative values ​​by dragging the slider to the left. I drag the Horizontal Distortion slider to -80%:

Reduction of horizontal distortion to -80%.

This gives us the same pseudo-perspective effect, but in the opposite direction:

A negative horizontal warp value reverses the direction of the effect.

We can achieve similar results with the Vertical Distortion option, except that the effect is vertical instead of horizontal. I reset the Horizontal Distortion option to 0% and increase the Vertical Distortion to 25% by dragging the slider to the right:

Increased vertical distortion to 25%.

This gives the text a familiar "Star Wars" look, but again, it's not a true perspective effect. The Free Transform command would still give better results:

Text with 25% vertical warp applied.

As we saw with the Horizontal Warp option, we can reverse the result by setting Vertical Warp to a negative value. I drag the slider to -25%:

Reduction of vertical distortion to -25%.

This time we have a reverse "Star Wars" effect:

Text with a vertical distortion of -25%.

It's unlikely that you'll want to use the horizontal and vertical warp options very often, and as I mentioned earlier, they're completely independent of the warp style you choose. In most cases you will simply want to select a warp style from the Style option and then adjust the strength of the warp using the Bend slider, leaving the Horizontal and Vertical Warp options at their default values ​​of 0%.

Make changes to the warping effect

If you are happy with the results, click OK in the upper-right corner of the Warp Text dialog to close it. If you look in the Layers panel, you'll see the icon on the Type layer.thumbnailhas been changed to indicate that warp effects are applied to the text on this layer:

The text layer now shows the warp text icon on the thumbnail.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the tutorial, one of the great advantages of these text warp options is that they are not permanently applied to the text. We can always go back and change all of the warp settings, including the warp style itself. To do this, make sure you have your text layer and text tool selected, then simply click the warp text icon in the options bar again:

Click the Warp Text option again.

This will reopen the Warp Text dialog where you can make the necessary changes. I think I'll change my bending style from arc toflag, I set my Bend value to 25%:

Change style from Arc to Flag and set Bend to 25%.

So I get a different warp effect applied to my text and I just had to choose a different style from the list. You can go back and make changes as many times as you like. So try out all 15 distortion styles to see what effect each one has for you. You'll find that some are way crazier than others. To cancel the warp effect and return to normal text, simply select "None" in the "Style" option:

The same text with the flag style applied.