Photoshop - Text as GIF, no background, not jagged
 

One thing I have never needed to do in photoshop untill now is save text as a GIF, with no background color or image. But everytime i do it the text turns out jagged. How can I save it as a GIF and keep the text nice and smooth?

:Hollering

the magic of anti-alias.

Crisp and antialias or you can make your text in adobe illustrator 8.0.1 and on, save as eps and open in photoshop and save as gif.

Your best bet is to use pixel fonts or sans-serif fonts with anti-alias as none. Once you get into goofy fonts you NEED to have anti-alias ON , as AMP said. But then you're going to get a casting effect (jagged shadowy, gross thingy). To offset that, when you optimize the gif for output and IF You know the background color the gif will go over, simply set the matte color to the color the background is going to be

Gif transparency will make ONLY ONE color transparent, therefore it cannot store aliasing transparency. You may fake it by using same background color as web page. Then it will look anti-aliased. In reality all anti-alias information is opaq, but it'll look ok when placed on *same* color background on web.

Just crate a layer below you text, fill it up with the same background color as web, Then export with selecting bg color as transparent color.

hire a real designer. Tennis Ace could use the work.

the font I really have to use is on the fancy side - it will be placed over a small grid background - thus I can't just put the background below the text image... it will throw the grid off. I have tried having the anti-alias on and off, but it is still crappy either way.

Maybe the best bet will be just to find a new font.... blah

That *might* be true depending on the font...but if you go to "Save for Web" and do what I said about setting the "Matte" color to a color that is dominant in the grid you should have a decent result. I know that this example uses bulky, square-ish fonts but the catch phrases MikeW used on http://www.farthammer.com/1/main.php...1683fcb 24995 ("THE GIRS WHO HAVE FELT THE MIGHTY HAMMER..." and all the others) are transparent gifs over a rather busy background image.

GIve it a try

:winkwink:

:thumbsup

You sir, are a God.

That worked perfect! I have never used that option before - I am sure glad I know about it now. It made the font just a tad darker - but thats cool, it actually fits the page.

Thanks !

Glad it worked with the font you're using...

it's a great technique for cutting down on bandwidth for larger pages. If the background is repeating I just make a nice, small image and set it as a background then use that technique for the stuff that goes over it

:thumbsup

Looks like Zayne E. has already solved this one!

But I just wanted to let you know we got some adult design tutorials up at: http://www.bluedesignstudios.com/tutorials.php

You may find these useful for any current or future designs.