Now if you look down in the lower right-hand side of your screen, you should see your Layers Palette, which is in a cluster with Channels and also Paths. Go ahead and select Paths and you will see in there Work Path. This is the one that we have just created. Because the name is in italic, it means it's not really been saved yet, as a definitive path inside the Photoshop file. So go ahead and double-click it, just like you would a layer inside of InDesign, and give it a name, something like Cutter. It's a Cutter path that we can use for many different functions later on.
Now go ahead and say OK. Visually nothing changes in the file, all we have done is added a postscript path that will now be recognized when it's dropped it into InDesign. So all you have to do is now save the file, press Ctrl+W or Command+W on the Mac to close it. Then jump back across into InDesign.
Now again, nothing is going to change visually in the file because we didn't make any pixel changes. However, if we now go down to the palettes on the lower-left hand side, remember when we setup our workspace earlier on, we did store the Text Wrap Palette right here. We can now come to the third icon, which will run around a specific shape. So go ahead and select that and what you'll notice immediately is all of the type disappears.
Well, that's because by default when you select this, it changes the overall run around shape to be the same as the clipping path. Well, there is no clipping path on this image, it's basically the overall frame size. So immediately the entire frame has text wrap is now pushing all the text away, because it doesn't exist outside of the boundaries of the image frame.
However, if you come down to the Type option here, you will notice that we do have the ability to select a Photoshop Path as the run around shape. As soon as you select that, Cutter become selected because it's the one and only path inside that Photoshop document.
Now we can also change the run around value here. Maybe just lock that down to around 3 millimeters, make it a little bit closer, but you can see as you scroll from the left to right, that the text now wonderfully runs around the outside of that shape.
Now you may be curious as to why we chose to use a Photoshop Path, when we could maybe use the alpha channel or the overall transparency of the file. Let's say we cut this face out and put it on to it's own layer, and there was no background. Yes, we could use the alpha channel information, but may be the edge of this cut out will slightly soft as a few pixels on it, and that may be something we look out later on.
We could use that soft edge shape as run around, but it takes about 5 to 10 times longer for InDesign to calculate the run around, when it's based on a soft edge transparency, because it really needs to know which are the stronger pixels, which are the weaker pixels and based the run around on that. If you give InDesign the choice of only one sharp postscript path, whether we see it in the file or not, the run around is instant. If you ever want to try that sometime, it's very interesting to see, you get exactly the same result, but it takes so much longer to achieve it. So another little workflow tip that to help keep your production speed up.
