Anti-Aliased Small Text

First the A-A trick:

The trick is to enter the text in a font size about 4-5 times larger (GIF, 9.5K) than the intended size with the Blur Filled Edges (in the Effects.Drawing Merge Control) set to about 3 or 4. Do this in a separate canvas, then mask the text with the paint-can/floodfill tool (select the outside first, then invert the mask), float the mask and re-size it down to the final desired size. The blurring around the edges should now be so subtle as to look anti-aliased.

You can see with the example that I also added a shadow to the background. This technique also works very well with vector based clipart images. If you've bought one of those CD-ROMs with a couple billion clipart pictures on it (usually stored in .WMF - Windows MetaFile format) you can size the image up really big before you import it into ColorWorks (PMView .93 reads and converts .WMF files nicely), blur it two or three times with the full canvas tool and one of the filters in the Smoothing Lab, then size it down by a factor of half or more before dragging it into the final image/canvas.

Remember to fill the background of the work canvas with whatever background color will be in the final image, otherwise you'll get an unpleasant 'halo' effect when you drag the finished text/artwork.

Readers Tips

I had been trying to get a beveled look, similar to the one in the Black Box plug-in by Alien Skin for PhotoShop. I discovered this method by sheer accident:

1) On an empty canvas draw a text object. It can be of any font you like as long as it is not too wide and not too narrow. It can be of any color and it can have anti-aliased filled edges.

2) Next we need to blur the object. We could use one of the filters in the Smoothing Lab but they do not blur enough. I prefer to use a custom filter in the Custom Filters Lab. I use the following matrix (but you could use a stronger one if you wanted):

1 0 1 0 1
0 0 1 0 0
1 1 1 1 1
0 0 1 0 0
1 0 1 0 1

Apply this to the object using the Reapply command (or Shift-Backspace) 5-7 times. Right now the object should seem like it was back lit.

3) Now clear all effects and select the Edge Detection Lab. From here you can go for two looks. One is to keep the settings the way they are and the other is to select "Invert Edge Detection". Let's keep the original settings and do a Reapply. This will give a black 3D object look. If we had reapplied with the "Invert Edge Detection" check box selected we would get a white 3D object.

We could get several different effects by using an unfilled shape object, or by changing some of the settings, or by reapplying the Edge Detection Filter twice with the same or different settings.

Readers Tips (take 2)

This shows up OS/2 e-Zine! editor, Trevor Smith, too. After submitting my last month's Powertips column he wrote back saying he did the same thing by using the Image.Resize-Canvas dialog, clicking 'Apply' without changing the canvas size. Phew, glad I didn't go with my first method: Use a screen capture program to copy the contents of the active window to the clipboard then paste it back in. But now we know 4 different ways (including one good one) to do the same thing. Thanks, Carsten!

Download Depot

Blur Much custom filter (.FLT, .1K) - Save to the x:\cworks\cusfltr directory. Imran Javaid's custom blur.

Long-fiber paper texture (.TXR, 16.4K) - Save to the x:\cworks\texture directory.

Skin texture (.TXR, 36.9K) - Save to the x:\cworks\texture directory. An animal-skin texture.

Hieroglyphics texture (.TXR, 36.7K) - Save to the x:\cworks\texture directory. Just like the ancient Egyptian Heiroglyphics.

SPG News

A company called Solution Technology Inc. (STI) has just released a TWAIN compliant scanner plug-in for ColorWorks. This now allows you to use ColorWorks to acquire images from your TWAIN scanner. The product lists for US$49.95 for users who already own an STI scanner driver, or US$79.95 with STI's Consumer Driver Pack. Full details are available in SPG's press release.

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