Type Tips Weekly

- [Instructor] Hi, I'm Nigel French. Welcome to Type Tips. This week I'm in Photoshop, and I have a tip about the resolution of Photoshop text. Now, of course, if you're creating a logo, you should be in Illustrator, not Photoshop. Illustrator is always going to give you crisp Vector output, but there are some reasons why you might be using Photoshop for your text. There are some effects that you just can't do in Illustrator that you can do in Photoshop, or that you can do more easily in Photoshop. We're looking at an example of such an effect; applying texture. Another reason might be that you're just more comfortable in Photoshop or that you don't have Illustrator. Now, as you may know, if you keep your type layers live, which is always a good idea for as long as you can, hopefully forever, then your type will be editable and it will be crisp Vector text. But, when you save the Photoshop file, and you place the Photoshop file in InDesign or in Illustrator then it is going to get rasterized, i.e. it's going to be rendered as pixels. Let's just switch over to InDesign, where I have that same file but without the texture, placed as a PSD file, and it has an effective resolution of 381 pixels per inch, so that's more than enough pixels to reproduce crisply, and yet, when we zoom in, and I'm going to look at that curve on the "P", when we get to a very large view size, we can see the telltale signs that this is actually pixels. So I'm going to come back to Photoshop, here is how we can avoid that happening. So I'm using this texture effect briefly, how I got this was placing a layer of texture above my type, coming to my channel's panel, command clicking on the RGB channel to load the gray values of that, and then turning that off, and then I'll just delete the one that's already there. Adding that active selection as a layer mask, and then, I came to the filter menu, camera raw filter, there's a new slider in camera raw, called "texture", I'm going to apply that at its max here. And then I'm also going to press command or control L, and move my black point and my white point sliders, closer to the center, and get my gray point slider, and move that slightly to the right, so that's going to effect the contrast. So I did all of those things. Now, rather than save this with the type layer, what we're going to do is convert the type layer into a shape layer. And to do that, right click to the right of the layer name, and choose "convert to shape". Now as a shape, it is a Vector path outline. And then, I'm going to save the document, not as a Photoshop but Photoshop EPS. That really archaic file format that you never thought you'd use again. And I want to make sure that Include Vector Data is checked. Okay, so I've gone ahead and done all of that, and now I'm going to switch back to InDesign, and go to my second page, where I have a side by side comparison. So here is the PSD file, effective resolution of 381 pixels per inch. Click on my info panel that's telling you that. And then, here is the Photoshop EPS file. Now, when I click on this, there's no resolution. That's because it's all Vectors. So remember how it was with the "P" on the PSD file, we were seeing the pixels when we zoomed in really large. I'm going to do the same thing here, and I am in my overprint preview to get the most reliable view here. Also, I should mention that my display performance is set to high quality display. You might, if you wish, export this to a press ready PDF and compare there, but the result is going to look exactly the same as it does here if you're in overprint preview. I'll now zoom in, and you can see that the edge, obviously the interior of the letter, that's going to look pixelated, that is the texture, but the edge is nice and crisp, including that curve. So the key is, that we save the type layer, or we convert the type layer, or convert a copy of the type layer to a shape, and then we save the file as a Photoshop EPS.