P: Improve font antialiasing

When I use the type tool on Photoshop CS6 for Mac OS X, I can never get the text's anti-aliasing to look exactly like the system's (some of the options look similar, but ultimately doesn't 'feel' the same as that on OS X). Below is a comparison:


Is it possible an additional smoothing option labelled perhaps "System" could be added?

Yep,and it does look a lot like the smooth option.

Understood.

But the Win 8 IE10 output without color-assist looks okay, right? That resembles the PS CS6 "Smooth" setting to me.

-Noel

Or we have investigated it and figured out why it doesn't work in an image editor, and talked to the OS vendors about why they are abandoning the concept. Yes, it would be a lot of work, for no or negative benefit.

And yet on my monitor it looks horrid (misplaced edges, strong color fringes) - because I probably have a different color filter order on my display. That's one of the reasons why color filter antialiasing is non-portable, and doesn't work well in an image editor.

This visual comparison might interest you.

Image is not available

To me Win 7 IE9's subpixel rendering with color-assist is the clear winner. We have already seen the best we will ever see of today's technology.

-Noel

Windows 8's Internet Explorer 10 does not use color-precompensated subpixel antialiasing. See the post immediately below for screenshots clearly showing this.

I queried Microsoft specifically on this and they responded that it's being done on purpose, but would not say why. I am only left to assume that it's being done to more easily facilitate rotation on a tablet display. It does degrade the user experience for folks with mere 100 ppi desktop monitors.

Note that as higher resolution displays (think "Retina display") become ubiquitous, tricks like the color-precompensation to allow the font to light up just 1 or 2 of the 3 LCD color bars won't be needed. There will simply be enough resolution that either the grayscale smoothing or even no smoothing at all will be required as it will be done optically.

-Noel

Something I don't understand is "OS vendors are moving away". Windows still uses it and has used it for ages. When we start to have high resolution monitors the demand for any sort of anti-aliasing will be gone, but there will always be a place for ClearType on Windows for non-high resolution displays.

Does it differ from CS5? It looks OK, but Crisp just isn't crisp in my opinion.