Sharp text printing? Blurry text printing problem.

[satchi]

hi, i have noticed something when i use the text tool with Photoshop (v7.0). When you print out the picture including the layered text, it doesn't appear to be clear. It seems as if the text is blended into the whole picture and then treated as a picture when printing, thus making it blury. I normally use 12pt font size.

Is there any possible way to print 'sharp' text out as if you were printing out a Word document or .txt document file?

Any suggestions is appreciated, thanks in advance.

satchi

 

[viol8ion]

What file format are you saving the image as, and what resolution, and what is the size of the image that you are printing?

Photoshop rasterizes the text for printing, that is, it turns it into a series of dots. If you are saving the file as a low quality JPEG, and especially if you are saving the image at a resolution of 72PPI, then you will get a low quality print.

If you are printing to a laser printer or ink jet, try saving your image at 150 PPI (don't resize the one you have, that will just increase the blurriness) and save the image at the highest quality in JPG or even better, as a TIFF.

When in doubt, deny all terms and defnitions.

http://www.wuli.com

 

[deeshubby]

viol8ion is right.

Once upon a time, in older versions of Photoshop, if you wanted crisp text you would use another application like Adobe Illustrator; PageMaker or Quark XPress to create the text.

Then, import the Photoshop picture (usually saved as TIFF or EPS) onto a box or layer, and then send the photo layer behind the text layer.

The text would print out at whatever resolution the printer was capable of (using PostScript). The picture would print out at whatever resolution the file was saved as.

 

[deeshubby]

if you choose to save out the Photoshop file as a PDF, it may give you an option to save the text layers as independent fonts; which would help you achieve the affect I mentioned in my last post.

I believe I have done this with mixed success.

If there were special raster effects applied to the text (drop shadows, emboss, etc) then the text would be rasterized no matter what, and not treated independently of the image.

 

[satchi]

Hi, thanks for all the replies.

The image files are usually saved as .psd and jpg(highest quality) format. I believe the resolution is on default, which is 72dpi(ppi?) (??), and the size is around 100k, not too large.

I'll try out both the methods above, which is to save the file as I would normally (.jpg/.psd or .tif), but in a higher resolution, and to save as .pdf w/ text layer. I'll let you know how it turns out. Thanks again!

satchi