Newbie needs advice on font edging

Hello,

I'm new to this forum obviously. I'm not terribly new at photoshop, I've been using it for a few years and have always had the latest version thanks to a job that pays for my licensing.

I've been noticing some trouble. I'm trying to make a clean logo for a blog i have. I need an outline on one of the font layers to define it better. But when I do this, i get a jagged result. No matter what i do?

I've rasterized the font and done everything else I can think of but it still looks terrible.

Can anyone think of what might be causing this issue and how to resolve it? I'm not skilled enough to know. I'm referring to the 1px ouline in white that is placed on the font.



Here's a link to the PSD so you can see the differences. If you hide the 'Text Background' layer you can see what i'm getting at.
http://www.fosterkitty.com/stuff/header.psd

Did I ask this in the wrong forum?

Have you tried using a style on the font instead? Just a thought. I tried to open your psd but all I got was page coding. Can you upload the image somewhere else so I can see exactly what you are talkin about.. Maybe I can help, but without seeing what your talking about exactly, I'm not sure.

That's what I'm using is a font style. Just a 1px stroke. I rasterized the font too. In fact, I thought maybe it was just a poorly made font before so I switched to Impact which I figured would be fine.

Not sure what the problem is opening the file. Did you save it prior to opening it? Just to make it easier I zipped it up. Keep in mind this is optimized for CS3.
http://www.fosterkitty.com/stuff/header.zip

I really appreciate you looking at this with me.

P.S. When I saved the file to upload I named the layers so you could quickly see what's what. I don't do this when just working on my own stuff. But this wasn't a tutorial or downloaded file. I created it.

Nobody else got any ideas?

hard to say, cos the header looks ok to me :-/

if anything, i'd say it could be down to your resolution.

FastNOC said:

That's what I'm using is a font style. Just a 1px stroke. I rasterized the font too. In fact, I thought maybe it was just a poorly made font before so I switched to Impact which I figured would be fine.

Not sure what the problem is opening the file. Did you save it prior to opening it? Just to make it easier I zipped it up. Keep in mind this is optimized for CS3.
http://www.fosterkitty.com/stuff/header.zip

I really appreciate you looking at this with me.

P.S. When I saved the file to upload I named the layers so you could quickly see what's what. I don't do this when just working on my own stuff. But this wasn't a tutorial or downloaded file. I created it.

FastNoc,

I played with your image a bit. I see exactly what you mean about the 1px border. What I found was no matte what you do since you expanded the text to make the shadow, you're going to get that jagged looking border.

This is what I would suggest you do. Get rid of that really predominant drop shadow on the layer all it's own. You also need a font that is a bit smoother so to speak (something where the pixels are not so "pop") If that makes sense.

I tried other fonts the ones that worked for me were the ones that were more cursive and had more spacing between each letter. I you want to keep that overlay of the white on you letters, the mock gradient so to speak. You can but..... I found that I had better results with styles. There are a ton of them out there that you can download for free. Do a search on About.com for free photoshop styles. I know it's cheating a bit but it will save you some time. Just download a few different ones and try them out. I would also hit Dafont.com too for some more fonts. They have a ton of fonts there that are free to download.

I just thought of one more thing you could try... ctrl+click on your text then go to select modify expand by 1px and then select-modify-smooth and smooth by 1 or 2 px. Then fill with black and see how that looks. If that doesn't work for you, then do try what I suggested.

Here are a few links to really nice styles for you to check out.

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshopstyles/Free_Photoshop_Layer_Style_Effects.htm
Sues styles are really nice so are the ones made by John Woods. Don Lees are pretty good too. They have more of a Movie theme though. Like I said before just play with it a bit (the styles and Fonts)

Phantom

Thanks for all your post