smooth / crisp type

[xgipper]

Hi
Just a quick question; I did quickly look in the help file/pdf manual but couldn't immediately find any answers, and I don't use PL too much so excuse me if this is an easy one, but I've just been making up a web banner ad and I'm finding the type is pretty jagged. Is there something easy to smooth it a bit? I seem to remember in Photoshop there is a 'smooth/crisp' option in the text palette.
Thanks a million for any quick advice - ideally so I can make layers I've already made crisper!

[Hoogo]

Usually this is controlled by the Antialias-Button in the toolbar. When enabled, you should see the typical antialias-gre-pixels around a white text on a black background when you reduce to pixels.

To check that:
-Enable Pixelmode with "View > Pixelmode, CTRL+1"
-Zoom to 400% to clearly see the pixels.

If you don't see the anti-aliasing then try this:
-There's the attribute-dialog, usually at the right bottom. If you disabled it, enable it with "view > panels > attributes"
-There you will find an option "antialias" for the text layer. Try "always"

If it is still not smooth enough, add a blur-layer to the text.

[addison]

Try previewing in the web export (Alt + x) and see how it looks. I've found that there's sometimes a little "jaggedness" with type that contains hinting (at least I think that's what it is), but when I preview in web export, all is well.

-Addison

[xgipper]

Thanks - located and activated antialiasing button: all good.

[xgipper]

Usually this is controlled by the Antialias-Button in the toolbar. When enabled, you should see the typical antialias-gre-pixels around a white text on a black background when you reduce to pixels.

To check that:
-Enable Pixelmode with "View > Pixelmode, CTRL+1"
-Zoom to 400% to clearly see the pixels.

If you don't see the anti-aliasing then try this:
-There's the attribute-dialog, usually at the right bottom. If you disabled it, enable it with "view > panels > attributes"
-There you will find an option "antialias" for the text layer. Try "always"

If it is still not smooth enough, add a blur-layer to the text.

Another banner, another jagged text problem.

At first I thought it was because I had used a 'distort frame' effect, then I thought it might be the choice of font - Bernard MT - so I switched to Arial with no effects. I used the 'always' on the 'antialias' text layer, but my experience seems to be that I have to constantly keep re-setting this back to 'always' - and it seems to make no difference anyway. I have zoomed into 400 % and I can certainly see no changes in real time to the text when either this or the control panel tool is changed.

When I use the Alt x preview mode, as kindly suggested in another reply, it looks fine on the screen - it's just when I save my animated gif the text is jagged. So I'm thinking, could it be the way I'm saving my gif (256C meridian best cut was already selected and I have no idea what these options mean), and secondly, could you advise on how to add a blur layer to the text please?

Or any other suggestions - the job's taking rather a long time sorting this out!

Thanks.

[Martin Huber]

When I use the Alt x preview mode, as kindly suggested in another reply, it looks fine on the screen - it's just when I save my animated gif the text is jagged. So I'm thinking, could it be the way I'm saving my gif (256C meridian best cut was already selected and I have no idea what these options mean),

A GIF can have a maximum of 256 colors. "256C meridian best cut" - which is in fact "256, Best Color, Median Cut" - means, that the image will be reduced to 256 colors, and the color palette will be calculated using the Median Cut algorithm (that favors colors, that occur frequently). "Best Color" means, that the result won't be dithered.
There's nothing wrong with this setting. But if there are too many colors in your image, there won't be enough colors to antialias properly.
Without seeing the original document (the PLD file, not the GIF), it's hard to tell, what's going wrong.

and secondly, could you advise on how to add a blur layer to the text please?

You can either rasterize the text layer (Layer > Convert Layer Type) and blur the result (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur) or add an adjustment layer to the text layer:
- select the text layer
- use "Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gaussian Blur" and turn on the chain symbol in the bottom left of the Gaussian Blur dialog.

But adding an additional blur increases the number of colors in your document which will result in an even worse GIF.

Martin

[Hoogo]

Alt+X only exports the current layer and calculates the palette for this layer only. Using this as an preview for an animated gif with multiple layers could show something different.

What happens if you use "tool > colors > reduce colors" instead? There you can check "all layers", that can produce a quite different palette.

[xgipper]

Thanks - I'll give it a try on the next job. Had to complete the one I was working on - ended up using a font I didn't want to with a white outline, which didn't look too bad!

[Herbert123]

If you are preparing web graphics with alpha transparency, you shouldn't be using GIF as it is, but PNG 8bit with an alpha channel, unless you mean to create small animations.

My workflow consists of:
1) saving a full 32bit png version
2) open it in Color Quantizer (http://x128.ho.ua/color-quantizer.html) - it's free
3) set the number of colours, and save an optimized version.
4) and, when necessary, remove all redundant meta data with TweakPNG. (http://entropymine.com/jason/tweakpng/ )

Color Quantizer allows for 16 up to 256 colours limited 8bit palette with full transparency, and even limited colour palettes in 24/32bit png with steps of 512/1024/2048/4096 to maximize the potential of the PNG format.

So much more flexibility than gif! And the equivalent png is (in my experience) always smaller in file size than the gif version in comparison (as long as you remove all the redundant meta data and possible embedded colour profiles).

ps for macs try ImagOptim: nice for a quick 'n dirty optimization. (http://imageoptim.com/) But I prefer CQ myself.

[xgipper]

Thanks. I'm mainly making animated banners.