P: Improve font antialiasing

It looks like Adobe PS team just does not want to ever implement this wonderful subpixel rendering technology. I bet it's too much of work for the little benefit or something.

Either way, I hope high resolution displays start arrive fast because there is no need for *any sort of anti-aliasing* in those displays. 🙂

I understad, but for web-previews this still would be very useful :-)
It will likely take 5 years or more before 'retina' displays become common.

And Photoshop CS6 does have better font antialiasing.

But Windows snaps the font stems to pixel boundaries, resulting in distorted but sharper type in some cases. (and they get dinged all the time for the bad composition and spacing)

Photoshop's font engine does a little bit of that, but errs on the side of overall composition and appearance rather than making each letter sharp.

I was hoping for better anti alias options in CS6. The problem isn't really sub-pixel sampling at all. It's more the blurriness of the fonts. Windows cleartype shows the fonts pixel-perfect, not blurred.

See the attached image. First is Photoshop crisp (or sharp I forgot). Second is roughly retouched by me to make the font more pixel-perfect (but far from perfect ;-).

The complexity can get too large to manage, and the tech can't always work well (like in image editors that don't know the final layout).

All good points, but...

It's better to eliminate the complexity rather than just make the tech work right? Is this the theme of the new millenium? "It's too difficult, just forget it." Sad if true.

Who's to say it wouldn't make a high resolution display look even better? When did "what's not obvious won't hurt you" become the proper philosophy?

Here's hoping the next few years really do bring 200+ ppi displays.

You realize you really are going to have to fix the Photoshop menus to be resizeable, don't you? :)

-Noel

Possibly they know what sorts of monitors are coming in the next few years?

And possibly they've already been dealing with bugs due to rotatable displays, or displays that mis-report their color order?

And they know that color filter antialiasing doesn't work on tablets, phones and other portable devices (because orientation can change too often, and many have odd color layouts).

I understand completely about the color filter antialiasing. I note that IE10 doesn't do it at all, though the rest of Windows 8 still does. Frankly I think it seems a bit silly that the OS makers are driving away from this - it's a little too soon. I don't blame you for not implementing it for image prep though - one simply can't know what the target monitor is like.

If only the hardware makers would provide us with 200+ ppi display options on real monitors, because the color filter antialiasing really DOES work when there's insufficient resolution... Right now we just don't have an alternative.

Consider the following blow-ups and actual macro photos of same as displayed at original size on my monitor:





If that doesn't make it obvious (to the OS makers) why color filter antialiasing is still needed on today's monitors, I don't know what would. Maybe they figure a demand for better monitors will emerge if they stop compensating.

-Noel

We found a couple of bugs in the antialiasing, and added one control (sorta hidden since it shouldn't be changed by most users) for the antialiasing of text.

We still can't use color filter antialiasing (for many reasons), and the OS vendors are still moving away from it anyway.

But the Sharp antialiasing should be much, much closer to OS and browser rendering. (ignoring the bugs and variations in each OS and browser version)

I have. They're all good, and I'm not sure which I like best.

While you don't have options for ClearType-style color-assisted font smoothing, the smoothing you have implemented looks very nice.

How have you changed it between Ps CS5 and CS6?



-Noel