Hi all,
I'm trying to create different shapes using the pen tool on 300dpi surface but most of the lines that are not perfectly straight appear jagged or blurry. I thought the pen tool is supposed to create smooth shapes or am I missing something? Is there a way to get these lines crips without appearing jagged, I don't want to blur the edges just want a smooth line.
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How smooth a line will be when it is rendered depends on size and resolution. If you want smooth and sharp you have to edit high resolution image and render them on devices capable of rendering high resolution image like printers and the iPhoneX . Your display is most likely not up to the task. And you images resolution is also lower than you want.
Here is a 1" 500dpi circle is it 1" on your display even on an iPhoneX it would display larger than 1" Display use their dpi resolution. Not the Image's DPI setting.
Hi Michelle,
it is for a website logo, around 500pixel width but looks all jagged and blurry which is not a great sharp look I want for a logo.
if you look at the lines of the shapes (black,white,red) vs the smooth lines of the font, it makes it look unsharp and jagged.
By @kelly31510492po6vhow do you actually draw a vector shape layer instead of masking one with pixels?
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You've resurrected a topic from 2017. I'm not Theresa.
That said, change Pen Tool option from path or pixels to Shape. See screenshot.
Or use one of the Shape Tools.
Hope that helps.
If this is the case, how do you actually draw a vector shape layer instead of masking one with pixels?
By @kelly31510492po6v
The Pen and shape tools always draw vector paths. If you see low-res or jaggy pixels, that is not because it’s not vector, it’s because of this, which is what I think Theresa means:
In Photoshop, the detail shown in a vector shape is always limited by the resolution of the document itself. The larger the pixel dimensions, the cleaner the vector shape can be.
Here’s an example:
You draw a vector shape in a document set up to be 1 x 1 inches at 96 ppi. If printed one inch across, it has visible blockiness. Why? Because that document only has 9,216 pixels to work with (it’s 96 * 96 pixels).
If you change the ppi of that document from 96 ppi to 300 ppi, and print it the same 1 inch across, the same vector shape looks much cleaner. Why? There are now 90,000 pixels to work with (it’s 300 * 300 pixels), or almost ten times the pixels to use for resolving detail.
And the only change in that example is the total number of pixels in the document. The vector shape never changed, yet it got sharper! That proves that it is a true vector shape. Because if it wasn’t, it could not have automatically used the maximum detail available at a different resolution. That’s what vector shapes do.
There are regular posts on the forums complaining that a vector line is too jaggy. Often, they are designing web banner ads at a typical size like 300 x 200 px, or an icon at 64 x 64 px. At such low pixel dimensions, there are just not enough pixels to resolve a clean line out of pixels or vectors. How it looks in Photoshop, however jaggy, is exactly how it would look if, in the first example, you made a 300 x 200 grid on paper or out of Lego bricks and created the same line. It is not a lot of squares, and cannot resolve any further.
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