P: Improve font antialiasing

What if you made it optional? The same way there's multiple rendering options such as sharp, crisp, strong, and smooth.

Or is there a way to at least fake it like there's a faux bold and faux italic?

Not sure if any of these options goes against what you just said.

We have been talking to the team that does the font rendering inside Adobe, including the engine in Flash. Unfortunately, "subpixel" aka color filter antialiasing is not portable -- it depends on the exact layout of colors on your display. This is why OS makers are abandoning color filter antialiasing - it doesn't work on devices that can rotate (tablets, phones, new LCDs), nor on devices with non-RGB pixels (4 and 6 color displays).

Check out Flash's new TLF font rendering. It's subpixel and it's awesome. 9pt Arial looks sharp and legible. Adobe should just use the same font rendering engine for Photoshop.

Chris: d'oh... I wish I had access to the length FR discussion from 2-3 years ago... you were a big contributor to the discussion, and many good points were raised... so forget about my ATM comments... still, some improvements would be nice to the (small) font rendering.

We're already using a more recent version of that same type engine (and have been since Photoshop 4 or so).

Chris: what happened to the old ATM font rendering engine under OS9? it's been an awful long time, but I think I remember the font rendering was quite nice (could be wishful thinking on my side also)... if it was nice indeed, shouldn't the code float around somewhere on the adobe servers, and shouldn't you (or somebody) be able to pull it out of storage again? just an idea...

The color filter antialiasing is possible without opaque backgrounds, it is just expensive (more memory, more computation) and not easy (and why most apps only do it when they composite the entire image).
MacOS also turns off color filter antialiasing for all but built-in displays (as of 10.6).

Yeah, I've got several ideas on how to get better font rendering. And lots of experiments to do or get done to figure out more details.
But improving rendering is not the same as matching OS or browser rendering - and that's another set of experiments to get done.

Yeah, it definitely seems like subpixel anti-aliasing is on the way out in a lot of situations. It hasn't ever been in iOS—I assume that's mostly due to the flexibility of the screen orientation. Certainly seems less important with 250ppi+ displays (ie. the Retina display).

I'm all for nicer font anti-aliasing in Photoshop. Do I have anything good to offer in how that could be done? No. I'm really not sure what the solution is. I do like iOS and Mac OS X's font rendering though.

I'm sure Chris will know the technical reason for this, but I believe subpixel antialiasing is only possible when compositing on opaque backgrounds. That's certainly the only way it works when building Mac apps.

I posted this request for previous PS releases, I think way back for the CS3 release, basically asking for a more OS-like or browser-like font rendering, especially for people who need to mock-up websites and other interfaces. I am glad that this request have come up again, and it would be great to see this in PS CS6, especially since I heard the same reasoning why it couldn't be done back then.

whether it does it wrong or not, or through clear type or not, it still does a better job antialiasing than PS does. Check this out: http://edw.me/14291Y3f0E2C1z0F0k3F