Sharp and smooth edged text ? How to ?

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plainman007

Well-known member
Hi Guys,

Can you help me by telling me how i can make text really sharp for posters or as image overlays for video etc. I want test thats smooth/sharp looking like phototypeset letters. Whats the technique to do this ?

Ive been doing things like making the text really large to start with and then using transform to scale it down to the proper size i need. Ive also tried adding a very very minor blur to the text before reducing it into the correct size for my poster. While these seem to help i would like to know if theres a better or more customary way of doing this.

I only own photoshop and cant reinvest in learning + software like coreldraw or illustrator. Can what im trying be acheived well with the photoshop interface itself ? Thanks in advance.
 
All text in photoshop since version 6 or 7 is vectored. You don't need to scale it, or make any changes via transform. For print, just make sure you are workin with as high a dpi as you need, no less than 300, ever, prefferably 500-600. If you save your document as a .psd and use it in Premiere or After Effects, or any other editor that recognizes vectored type, you should be ok moving it and scaling.

You may also want to experiment with the different anti-ailasing options for the text in Photoshop as well, to find one that looks best to you.

Lastly, some custom fonts may give you problems, just as custom brushes can when they are very large, so sticking to non-serif non-specialty fonts can help. Many still look just fine, but that is something to watch out for.
 
Hi Matt,

Im using photoshop 7.0. If its for print i usually work at 600 dpi since my system is quite robust. But .psd within Vegas gives some problems doesnt it ? I usually save as .png to import into vegas. But again i dont know if you work with Vegas to shed light on this aspect.

My work is not only constrained to print media, im sometimes do simple things like making newsletters which is nothing but a single image made in photoshop. The paragraph text there is sometimes pixellated. Very slightly ofcourse. The larger text (such as titles etc) doesnt seem to look bad. Especially the smaller text.

Does it help to rasterize the text before flattening all layers or saving to final output ?
 
plainman007 said:
Does it help to rasterize the text before flattening all layers or saving to final output ?
Click to expand...

No!!!! Never!!!!!!!!!!

Rule #1, my friend. NEVER RASTERIZE TEXT UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST!!!

Matt is right, but I'd like to take it further.

If you are going to be printing a document, please please please save it first as a PDF file. Printing out of Photoshop can allow for poor print quality with regards to text... at least in my experience.

I know exactly what you are dealing with. The idea here is simple: The more vector-based assets you have in your projet, the better. In fact... when I edit photos in photoshop and want to use them in a design, I edit them at FULL RESOLUTION and then drop the .psd file into InDesign where I can then scale it down to the size I want, without compromising ANY resolution. That means I can zoom in to like 600% and still not lose ANY quality on my photos.

When you rasterize your text layers you are essentially saying "this is as big as the text can and will ever get". Period. If you need to rasterize text be sure that you have a purpose, and that you do so with the intent of editing it at full resolution (preferably one higher than the document itself).

So in short...

Design your project in Photoshop and (since you can't afford InDesign) DO NOT RASTERIZE your text... then export a PDF file. Open it, and print. Tell me what happens.

Best of luck!
 
Hi Kyle,

Ok i shouldnt rasterize. But Kyle most of the stuff im designing is for online images which go out as newsletters. I mean i dont know how to create html newsletters for email. So i just make a large photoshop image which will look correct in the recipients mailbox. Then i send it via outlook express as an inbody image. I usually work on actual size but at 600 dpi or so. But i finally make out a jpeg with about 200dpi. Which is a better technique ? Working at actual size with double the final dpi needed or working at 3 or 4x times the size with actual final dpi needed ?
 
I guess, then, I don't see what the problem is. - If you are using it for web then WYSIWYG and it should look great as a full quality jpeg file.

If your text is still looking poor, try highlighting it, right-clicking, and make sure that the anti-aliasing SMOOTH option is checked.
 
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