Rounding text?

[Crewman47]

I was just wondering how you make a Starship registry rounded like on the Ent-A and Ent-E using Photoshop 5.5, or if not that can you do in any other Graphic editor, specifically any online free ones?

I am only able to get as far as writing the registry as text in Photoshop and I thought that if I rendered it I could round it, but I can't seem to find anything to do that with.

Is there a way? Thanks

BTW Love the new layout for the forum.

 

[David cgc]

I honestly don't know if this works back in Photoshop 5.5, but I'm assuming it does because I saw properly rounded registries done in that era. What you have to do is use the shape too to make a circle, and then use the text tool to open a new text box along the edge of the shape. The cursor should change when you float it over the edge of the circle to let you know to click there.

 

[Forbin]

Sounds like a lot of work when you can just use the correct font - Starfleet Bold. Google it, I'm sure it's out there as a TrueType font.

 

[Shaw]

It really isn't that hard... flatten out the text layer and then individually select the letters and use the free-transform tool to rotate and place the letters. In the example below I did this by also moving the rotation target to the center of the image field when doing the transformation.

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It is pretty straight forward.

All these types of techniques are in the Photoshop 5.5 User Guide, but you may want to find Adobe's Photoshop 5.5 Certification Guide and advanced Classroom in a Book for more detail (I have all these as I got my first Photoshop certification with version 5.0).

Still, a better tool for this type of thing is either Illustrator (version 8 would be a contemporary of Photoshop 5.5), Freehand or CorelDRAW. You can even place text on a curve in QuarkXPress 4 and later.

What platform are you using? If you are using Mac OS 8/9 I can point you in the right direction for a lot of helpful tools that are free.

 

[Forbin]

Ooohhhh, I thought you meant rounding out the corners of the letters, not placing the line of text in a curve.
Never mind.

 

[Crewman47]

Thanks for the help, I've checked the individual image rotating one and it seems to do the trick, think I'll give that a go when I have more time. Using the shape tool, I'm not sure what that actually means though as I can't find a specific tool like that that would do to the text that David CGC suggested. I'll have another go with that one anyway.

Thanks again

 

[Shaw]

Using the shape tool, I'm not sure what that actually means though as I can't find a specific tool like that that would do to the text that David CGC suggested. I'll have another go with that one anyway.

The tool he is referring to was part of a major revamping of both the text tool and the addition of vector elements starting with Photoshop 6 as I recall. They don't exist in 5.5 which still has you edit text within a separate window (rather than directly within the image).

 

[Tiberius Jim]

If you have Illustrator you can type directly to any given curve, so you could draw the correct curve that you need and then type directly on the path. That is, if you have Illustrator.

 

[Harry]

CorelDRAW does that too. Fit Text to Path, they call it.

 

[Forbin]

^Corel is what I use. Though I'm not pleased with the "simplification" changes they made to fit-text-to-path in version 13. Seems like you had a lot more specific control in previous versions.

 

[Reverend]

Don't get me started on Corel, they've practically murdered PSP XI. I may even have to learn how to use Photoshop and Illustrator now.

 

[USS Mariner]

Hell, I just use MSWord.

 

[Harry]

Yes, agreed on the 'interactive' Text-to-Path of Corel X3. But I'm just so used to CorelDRAW, I'm hopeless in anything else.