Since the early days of Elements, one of the biggest complaints about it has been that, for all the amazing things you can do with other parts of the program, its text-related features were pretty prosaic. You could glam up text with special effects, but it mostly ran left to right or straight up and down.

Elements 10 brings you three new tools for adding really fancy text to your images: Text on Selection, Text on Shape, and Text on a Custom Path. With these tools, you can make your text curve, swoop, and turn, or even run around a circle. They really bump things up when it comes to adding text to your images.

All the tools use a concept that, until now, only existed in full Photoshop: paths. A path is just what it sounds like. In the same way that your feet follow a path in the park, a path in Elements is a guideline for where text should go. The path is visible when you’re creating it, adding text to it, or editing the Text layer, but it won’t appear in the finished image. All folks will see is the cool ways you’ve made text snake around in your image.