OT: Problem with text on a DVD case insert

smhontz wrote on 2/16/2004, 1:05 PM
Sorry for the off-topic post, but my fellow Vegasians(?) seem to have "been there, done that" for everything, so, here goes...

I made a lovely DVD with DVD Architect, and now I'm trying to make a nice DVD case cover insert using Photoshop 7. I put all this nice text on the back, but it looks awful when printed on my laser printer. I can take the same fonts in Word, and make them any size from 6 pt to 120 pt, and they print out just great. In Photoshop, they look like they were printed on an old dot matrix printer. So, obviously text must be handled different in Photoshop. What do I need to do to get decent text?

Comments

Jsnkc wrote on 2/16/2004, 1:14 PM
Make sure you start out with a higher resolution, I would reccomend at least 300DPI. Also play with the text settings, I think they are set to none by default, try Sharp or Crisp, those 2 usually work pretty well for me, you can also try to rasterize the type, that might help a little bit also. I would try to stay around a minimum of 8pt size if possible, the smaller you get the worse it will look.
BillyBoy wrote on 2/16/2004, 1:19 PM
I'm a little in the dark since I jumped from version 5 to CS in Photoshop. So what was included in version 7 I don't know.

The CS version of Photoshop can set text to none, sharp, crisp, strong and smooth.

What you're probably seeing is the difference between aliasing and anti-aliasing which should surpess the stair case effect. The problem is at smaller sizes some font types looks BETTER when printed when not anti-aliased.

For super crisp text you can use a vector based application that keeps the text crisp regardless how small or large your scale it.

While it may not look as nice if you're more worried about crispness stay away from fancy fonts that are Serif based such as Times Roman that add the fancy parts on the top and bottom of letters and stick with something like Arial that doesn't. The smaller your text the more important that becomes if you want to avoid the blurry look. Also ink jets don't do as good as lasers in this regard.