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This month: a treasure trove of tantalizing tips for the Photoshop afficionados among you...(say that five times fast!) Text in Photoshop by Ken and Rhea Craig ken@mutt.com http://www.netdepot.com/~ken/ Q: Hi there! Can anyone give me tips on how to get clear text in Photoshop, like over a Bryce pict. I know it’s bitmaps but some people seem to get great clear text, small or large. I tried antialias on and off in both small and large text, very poor results!!! A: Make sure the image you’re working with is an RGB image, not indexed color. That sounds like the most likely problem, although your Bryce picts should open as RGB. Also, make sure you’ve got Adobe Type Manager or TrueType fonts installed (and they’re the ones you’re working with). If you’ve got deeper font problems, then I’m not the one to ask -- I can keep my system running, I understand the basic concepts, but when things start going wrong with my fonts I haven’t been very successful with fixing them short of replacing most, or all of my fonts with originals. And yes, you should antialias for the soft edges. Best JPEG Compression by Kevin Davis Connery keradwc@rahul.net Q: The KPT filter maker-capital of the world??!!! and here we are trying to use all these half-uhhh-formed JPEG or GIF converters and trying to make them do more artistically than they were written to do. It makes our KPT and Bryce work look so less than on the web, than it could. Just think of what we could do with a GOOD image compressor that is written like wysiwyg KPT interface. A really good tool. A: I’ve been very happy with Storm Technology’s JPEG compression/decompression plug-in. It’s enormously better than the stock Adobe save-as, with exactly one drawback; it isn’t, and won’t be, PowerMac native. Which makes it purty durn slow -- much slower than the built-in converter. Why, then, do I use it? It’s the only way short of their [Adobe]/Apple’s PhotoFlash to get multiple levels of compression in a single image. F’rinstance: if I’ve got a portrait of someone in front of a “pastoral background”, with the meadow, the flowers, the rest of the slightly out of focus stuff, if I compress the image using a High quality compression, the file willbe huge, as that background won’t compress much; it’s too “busy”. And if I use a High compression rate (low quality image), the face won’t look good. So I select the face (or at the least, the eyes and mouth, and the edges of the hair), save the selection as a channel, then export the image via the Storm-JPEG filter. Set the background to about 40-50%, the face to about 80%, and I’ve got an image which is as small as possible, with no artifacts in important areas. Of course, not being native, it does take a while to compress a PhotoCD or larger (20 meg+) image. Great package; available from lots of places as a close-out, as it’s not being updated [sigh]. [Ed. note: I got one of these a few years ago; software came with a Storm JPEG DSP card, which works great with Daystar and other software accelerators, for only $15.00 The card is equivalent to a Radius-type Photoshop accelerator card selling for up to $500!] Seamless Textures With KPT By KPT Joseph kptjoseph@aol.com http://www.joseph.iodesign.com Q: Can someone help me understand KPT seamless welder. I am trying to create small images for a webpage that will tile nicely as a background using the tag. I get my favorite texture explorer image and try a seamless weld, but it tiles still with perceptable boundaries. Does anyone have any good hints on what to include outside the selection area before applying the weld? Should it be part of the texture or a plain background. A: The most commonly overlooked feature of the Seamless Welder is the “preview edge matching” option. When you select that, the preview window shows you four tiled copies of your selection, so you can see in real time the exact effect you will get with your seamless weld. Also don’t forget that you can switch between “Seamless Weld” and “Reflective Weld”. The first takes image information from outside of your selection to create the seamlessness (best when you have lots of image outside the selection); that latter takes image information from the inside of your selection (best if you have minimal or no image on the outside of your selection). Hope this clears things up a bit ;-)
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