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Hi, I'm Allison Grayce
In this Treehouse Quick Tip, we're going to learn how to deal with unwanted
Anti-Aliasing in Photoshop and achieve pixel perfection when working with vector shapes.
This method is referred to as "Pixel Hinting"
In this quick tip all the using Adobe Illustrator CS6 and Adobe Photoshop
CS6.
Now I've gone ahead and created a simple logo in Illustrator, and i want to bring
that logo to use in a design I'm working on in Photoshop. So control-A to select
all, then control-C to copy
and let's navigate on over to Photoshop.
So let's go ahead and control-V to paste the logo. Photoshop gives us a dialogue box
that asks how he wants a paste in our vector shape. Since we want to be able to
edit the paths, we'll paste it in as a shape layer.
So i'm going to go ahead and scale the logo to my desired size, because if I
resize the sheep after pixel hinting, I'd need to do it all over again.
We're going to make this logo white
Perfect
So let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit closer here
if you noticed there is some unwanted anti-aliasing happening, especially
around these horizontal lines here
and what that does if we zoom back out
is it actually makes the logo appear a little bit blurry.
This happens to a lot of vector shapes because the paths are not completely
taking up one whole pixel, they're taking up a little more or a little less.
Sometimes for it to appear perfect, we will need to manually adjust the shapes.
In CS6 we will need to head to Photoshop
"Preferences" and "General"
and head on over to the very last check box here and
uncheck "Snap Vector Tools and Transforms to Pixel Grid"
press OK. Turning this option off will let us manually adjust where the paths fit into
Photoshop's pixel grid. You want to turn it back on if you are drawing shapes in
Photoshop later.
So let's go ahead and right click
and select the shape. So we can see the paths that make up the vector shape now.
First, let's go ahead and zoom in on the icon here.
As you can see this part of the paper airplane is not a perfectly straight
line, and because of this it's causing some fuzziness in the logo. So if we
navigate over to the toolbar and select our "Direct Selection" tool, we can
grab the anchors on our path
then we can use the right arrow
to nudge it to the right. We can see now that the line is beginning to appear
sharper.
We'll do the same thing for this anchor.
Moving along down to this horizontal line here,
click on the top left and top right anchors of this line, remembering to hold
shift, let's go ahead and use the bottom arrow of our keyboard to nudge it down.
And for the bottom left a bottom right anchors we will nudge it up a bit.
So if we zoom out we can see how much better our logo is beginning to look.
So moving down to the type, make sure to be careful. Text should and will have
anti-aliasing, especially around the curves where letters should appear smooth.
So only just the areas of the vector shape that should have a sharp clean edge.
We'll just fix the top and bottom of the letters and leave the rest alone.
to move around the canvas when you're zoomed in this close, just hold down the
spacebar.
So if we zoom out to one hundred percent, we can see that our logo is very
crisp and sharp.
Pixel hinting and snapping your vector shapes to a grid will result in a much
cleaner, crisper design.
Training your eye to be aware of the overall design down to each and every pixel is
what will set a good designer apart from a great designer.
If you would like to see more advanced videos and tutorials like this one,
go to TeamTreehouse.com and start learning for free.