Typophile

photoshop fonts <11 px - how to smooth them?

dr_dre

hello

i’m not happy with photoshop’s text smoothing. when a font (non-pixel-font) is like 10 px there are always ugly smoothing edges.

how do i achieve these very fine text smoothing like in http://www.filemaker.com/ (manage people etc. top left). in photoshop this just looks ugly.

what is the way to make very fine and accurate smoothing when text size is only like 10 px? thanks.

There is only one way: Ultrafonts.com
Please see my Mana fonts (soon to have an 11, and later a 9).

hhp

nice stuff. do i get this right: with this technology you can make an ultrafont out of every font? so ultrafonts are not new fonts but just altered fonts which have nicer smoothing?

Just checking: have you tried all anti-aliasing modes on Photoshop? (sharp, crisp, strong, smooth)

Ultrafonts is a font house that specializes in grayscale pixelfonts, which render out hand-crafted anti-aliased forms (although only at one give PPEM size). This level of quality cannot be -or at least has not yet been- automated. Also, you can’t “convert” from some other format to an ultrafont - at least not without spending gobs of time cleaning up - time better spent making one from scratch (like my stuff is).

hhp

What type in particular are you refering to on that site?

If you have the time and are saving as .gifs you can have an extra level of control by changing or removing the colours used in the anti-aliasing from the colour table in Photoshops ’Save for Web’ dialog.

This is easier in ImageReady though.

Ed.

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