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Smooth the edges


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I've created this graphic but I cannot find a good way to smooth the edges so the graphic looks crisp, but not pixelated.

I am using CS4
 

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Watched a tutorial on the pen tool and answered my own question.

I traced the shape with the pen and it worked great. It took a few minutes, but not bad.

Is that the best way to do this?
 
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I tried it a few more times and it really doesn't take long to get quick at it, especially after you learn to delete the reference points to stop the line from curving toward them. That was annoying at first!

Score another one for YouTube tutorials.

To anyone who has ever made a YouTube tutorial - THANK YOU!
 

Paul

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Care to show us your revised version?
 
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I made this graphic as an experiment. It is supposed to look like a Z and a T together.

I've decided to go with something else though because I don't like that it looks like a Fraternity Logo...not really the image I want for my business.

But here is the one that I traced with the pen tool. Pretty neat tool.

I watched the pen tool video by amigotube on youtube. I don't have enough posts to post the link.
 

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Tom Mann

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FWIW, Adobe Illustrator has much more advanced path tools than PS. For example, a couple of mouse clicks, and the outline of that graphic can be automatically traced and smoothed. For example, I didn't have to touch the pen tool to obtain the attached path.

Once you have such a nice path with a reasonable number of points, you can easily tweak the path, produce a rasterized version at any size, add whatever shading, stroking, beveling, and/or other efx you want, etc..

Tom M
 

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Tom Mann

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... and, as I mentioned earlier today, once you have a nice vector path, it's easy to apply traditional efx at any size, still have nice sharp edges, eg...
 

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IamSam

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Tom, the image you posted suffers terribly from the jaggies (aliasing), is there a way to clean that up?
 

Tom Mann

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Good observation, IamS.

I happened to save the PS file for this demo so I was able to go back and look at what I did. Even so, I'm not sure exactly what I did to introduce the jaggies.

The path from Illustrator was as smooth as silk (at any magnification). The pixel-filled area from Illustrator was almost as nice - almost no trace of stair-stepping.

I thought I had used exactly the pixel-filled Illustrator output as the layer mask as shown in the screen grab (below) of my layer stack, but when I now look closely at it, the layer mask was not exactly the same as what came out of AI. I'm not sure how I messed it up, but the version I used as the layer mask definitely had the jaggies and was the cause of the problem.

To check this was indeed the problem, I re-created that adjustment layer, and this time was uber-careful to use the correct layer mask. The jaggies are about as small as you can get without the edge being too soft (see attached).

Maybe I mindlessly thresholded the output from AI or did something else stupid yesterday.

BTW, you used the phrase, "clean it up". FWIW, I've tried lots of after-the-fact methods to clean up aliasing, stair-stepping and other such artifacts, and never have been particularly impressed by any of them. About the best of the lot is PRP's Anti-aliasing plugin ( http://powerretouche.com/Antialias_plugin_tutorial.html ), but like most things in life, fixing the cause is always better than attempting to fix the result ;-) .

Again, thanks for pointing out the problem.

Cheers,

Tom
 

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IamSam

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Thanks Tom for the explanation. The second version is much better. I agree with you, better to cure the problem than to treat symptoms.
 

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