[treehouse™ presents]

[Quick Tips: How to Achieve Pixel Perfection in Adobe Photoshop]

[with Allison Grayce]

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, I'll be 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, Ctrl-A to Select All,

then Ctrl-C to Copy,

and let's navigate on over to Photoshop.

So, let's go ahead and Ctrl-V to Paste the logo.

Photoshop gives us a dialog box

that asks how we want to 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 shape after pixel hinting,

I'd need to do it all over again.

We're going to make this logo white.

[mouse clicking]

Perfect.

So, let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit closer here.

If you notice, 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 1 whole pixel.

They're taking up a little more or a little less.

Sometimes, for it to appear perfect, we'll need to manually

adjust the shapes.

Now, in CS6, we'll 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 Okay.

Turning this option off will let us manually

adjust where the paths fit into Photoshop's pixel grid.

You'll want to turn it back on if you're 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, and we'll do the same thing for this anchor.

Now, let's move on down to this horizontal line, here.

Click on the top-left and top-right anchors of this line,

remembering to hold Shift,

and let's go ahead and use the bottom arrow

on our keyboard to nudge it down,

and for the bottom-left and 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 adjust 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.

[mouse clicking]

So, if we zoom out back to 100%,

we can see that our logo is very crisp and sharp.

Pixel hinting and snapping your vector shapes

to 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'd like to see more advanced videos and tutorials

like this one, go to TeamTreehouse.com,

and start learning for free.

[treehouse™]