Easily Make This Banana Text Effect Using Adobe Photoshop

1. Banana Text Intro: We're going to make this really cool graphic with a banana. But you can do this with well, quite a lot of fruits and other shapes as well. So as long as you've got something where the text will sort of fit, it works perfectly. I've done it with some kiwi fruit before and oranges. That one was a little bit more trying, but the banana works so well. Let's jump straight into this. 2. Add the Banana Photo: Let's get the item that we want to use, first of all, I'm going to use a banana, and I'd suggest you do exactly the same thing. If you can do it on a banana, then you'll find that despite some of the other fruit being a little bit more challenging, you can do it on them, too. Anyway, I've gone into Adobe Stock. If you've got a license for Photoshop, you will probably have access to Adobe Stocks free images. And I have gone to the free area there. I typed in banana, and here's my banana that I'm going to use, and I'll just license that in there and just download the banana. Now, back in Photoshop, I'm going to go and open up that banana. So I'm going to go to File and Open. I'm going to find the banana, which should be in the downloads over there. You can see we've got it. And I want to actually put this banana into a different image. So I want to do this image for a website. About bananas, presumably. So I'm going to go to file and new and make a new document. So I want to create something for the web. I'm going to choose 1920 by 1080, the web size large. And over here, I'm going to make sure that I'm on landscape not portrait. And the other very, very important thing I cannot stress this enough for the moment, switch artboards off. If you leave them switched on, you're going to get some weird layer thing which unless you actually know about artboards, will be a bit confusing. And then down here in the color profile, I'm going to choose SRGB. If you forget about that one, it's not the end of the world, but the artboards are really important. Leave them switched off, square pixels, click on Create. Now, I want to get my banana into here, and I just want to cut it out because it is on a white background. The fastest way to do that is to go down here to say select subject and let Photoshop find it for you. Look at that absolutely brilliant cutout. The selections in Photoshop, the latest versions are stunningly good. Now, I'm going to use a traditional method of doing this. I'm going to go to edit and copy, and I'm going to go over to my blank page, and I'm going to use Edit and paste to bring it straight in. Now, where's my banana going? Well, actually, it's down here. You can see it's huge. So if I zoom out, I'm going to use Command and minus because I'm on a Mac. If you're on a PC, use Control and minus to zoom out. And you can see my bananas kind of quite large. So I'm going to scale it down, and I'll do that by going to the Edit menu down to transform and choose scale. And that way I've zoomed right out so I can actually see these other little things to scale it down. I'll just scale that down to the size that I want my final piece to be. I think something like that. And then click on the little tick at the top to okay it or choose done from this little menu over there. Once you've done that, you can choose which way around you want your banana to be by finding your Properties panel. Now, if you can't see the properties panel, go to the window menu. Go down to Properties. And you'll see there's a little button over here. Normally, it comes up on the right hand side, by the way, over here, and I can actually flip that around. I can have it the other way if I wanted it. I'm just going to get it back to there, and I think I'll have the little I don't know, banana handle. I'm sure there's a proper name for it on that side. So if you'd like to get to that stage there, you should end up with, if you look at your layers, a background layer and then a cutout of the banana. And you know it's cut out because it's got that transparent look. If I just hide my background, you'll see we've got that little checkered effect on there. 3. Add the Text: I'm going to put some text in here now, so I'm going to go to my text tool. That's in the text bar over here, and I'm using the horizontal Type tool. And all I'm going to do, I'm not going to click and drag. I'm just going to click once over there. You can see it puts in this Lorimipsum bit of selected text, and I'm going to type in the word that I want. So banana. And I'm going to select it by clicking and dragging over it. I'm going to go and choose a typeface or a lot of people call them fonts, that's quite a thick one. So we want to be able to see some of the banana shape through it. And going down here, that one looks like quite an interesting, thick type face. Let's have a look at that. That is perfect. So I've used Alfon, but you can try any that you like. These are called slab type faces, by the way. And we're going to make that bigger by clicking on that little double T, or you can go into the drop down menu and choose a different size in or you can actually type in the size that you want. I find it easier to click on this little T and just scale it up like so. We'll do some final scales shortly. I'm going to use my move tool, that's the tool at the top to kind of move it down roughly to the right position, and then I'm going to scale this around a little bit more as well. But if you'd like to get to this stage here where you've got your text in there in front of the banana and then we'll make the text fit the banana shape. 4. Warp and Rasterize the Text: I'm going to zoom in a bit, once again, Command and plus or Control and plus and just move some of these things out the way. And I'm going to select the text because I want to move these characters closer together. So the easiest way to select text is to double click on the T in the Layers panel. You see, if I double click, it just selects it quickly. And down here where we had the font and the size, I'm going to go along to the T with some little sort of funny lollipop sticking out of it. Click on that. And over here, this is usually known as tracking. It's the distances between the characters. I can pull that over to the left or over to the right to change the distances between those characters. And I want them to be really nice and close together like that. Now, I'm happy with that. I'm going to go back to my move tool and sort of move this text roughly to where I wanted to go. I'm then going to go along and I'm going to scale it. So I'm going to use edit, transform, and I'm going to start off with scale, first of all. Now, I want this text to be taller but not wider. And you see, if I pull on here, it goes both ways, width and height. If you hold down your shift key and then click on one of these, you can do them independently so I can do the height separate to the width. Once again, I can just choose that, pull that in a little bit, like so. I think that's just about right. I will pull this down just a little bit more. Over there. And I'll click on Done. Now, we want to get the text to bend along the banana. We're going to do that manually, and I'm going to go to once again, edit transform. And what I want to do is I want to use a warp option for this. Now, the warp option that I'm actually looking for, you can see a lot of these are actually grade out is not available because this is still editable text. And that's the problem. If you get to here and you think, Oh, why can't I just manipulate this as I like? Well, what we have to do is we have to go along to the layer menu. And we are going to convert this text into just shapes. And this is the process is known as rusterization. So if I could layer, rusterize the type, you'll see it's no longer normal editable text. It's just a normal layer shape. Now, if I go to edit and transform, I can get to some other ones, and particular warp. Now, although warp showed up before, that was a text warp. This is a different warp where you actually have little handles that you can use in here. So I'm going to just pull this one up to them, pull that one up to them. You can see it's affecting the bottom of our picture, but don't let that be a problem at the moment. Let's pull that to there. This one to here. And once I've got those into the right position, see, we've got handles here. There's a handle there and a handle there. If I pull on this handle, it will allow me to change the curvature and I'll pull that one and I can change the curvature of that. Likewise, on this one here, I can pull that down to get the text to go down, and I can pull this one down to get the text to go down, as well. If you have some weird things like I've got over there, you can go to the other handle and just manipulate that until you get rid of those weird bits. Same with that. We just get rid of that little weird bit in there. And if this is not quite right, go back to the handle and pull it around. So is just a matter of playing with these little handle until you get your text into the correct position that you want, there's no right or wrong here. Just make it how you think it should be and fiddle with the handles until you feel it's right. I'm going to get the B right back up to there again like that. When you're happy with that, click on the tech. Have a go. 5. Add the Photo to the Text With the Clipping Masks: What I'm going to do now is to make a copy of this banana. So I'm going to take the banana at the bottom here and I'm going to drag it down so it goes on top of that little square with a plus in it, and that makes a copy. And we're going to take the banana text, and we're going to move that underneath both of those bananas. Let's go along to the top banana, and we'll click on the eye. So it's been hidden. Now, I know you can't see it here, but this one is actually hidden. So this is the banana which is sitting on top of the text. Click on that second banana down. This is important. The one that you can see. Don't do this on the wrong banana. So that second one down there that you can see, click on that. And here's the magic. We're going to go to layer, and we're going to choose Create Clipping mask. Look at that. This clips to the text, and it only shows the banana in the text shape. So that's the first bit. But now, how do we get the rest of the banana to come in? Well, that's why we made a little banana right at the top over there. Now, I'm going to click on that banana and show the whole thing. What we can do is we can erase out this middle bit over here. And I'm going to well, I'm going to use the erase tool. If you are a fay with using masks, by all means, put a mask on. It's a better way to do it. But if you don't know about masks, this is quite a nice easy way. I will before I do that, change the opacity a little bit so I can see where that text is. There we go. You can just about see the text, maybe a little bit more over there. I'm going to use a erase tools. I'm going to go over here to my eraser. Find a decent size brush. I'll use quite a hard brush over there. Make it a bit bigger. There we go. And then I can just start erasing this bit out over here. And really, what I want to do is I don't want to erase past that side of the B. So you'll see if I do that, but there up to about there. And this bit over here, right kind of up to that A. I'm going to make my brush a bit smaller. Over here so I can be a bit more accurate and do that bit, this bit over here. I just about got that and those bits in there. You can see how if you get your text running right up to the banana, it will actually look better. So we'll erase those bits over there, that little bit there, these bits down the bottom. And now we take the opacity right up and there you have the final result. Now, once again, as I said, I can see a little bit of a problem there, so I might have to just erase a bit more on that one to make it fit. Erase a little bit over here. Once you've done that, if you want to do anything else to it, by all means, have a go. If you'd like to learn more of Photoshop or see more of these type of effect videos, don't forget to click on my name right at the bottom and go to my profile and have a look at all the courses I do in Photoshop, Affinity, and Canva. And also click the Follow button. That way, you'll be notified of any new courses that I put out. Have so much fun with that. It's a brilliant, brilliant technique.