Anti-Aliasing: Your Best Friend and Worst Enemy

I always use shape layers while designing in photoshop. Not only do they allow me to draw using scalable vectors, but it also makes it super easy to resize and transform. However, if you are not careful while designing, sub-pixel antialiasing can occur and your rounded-corner box (that you just spent 20 minutes working on) can end up looking blurry and less-than-perfect. But have no fear, there’s a fix!

Snapping to Pixels

While anti-aliasing is wonderful and can help make things pretty, it can also have an adverse effect. There is a right and a wrong way to deal with it:

Photoshop offers a feature that can help you circumvent this problem – snap to pixels. When creating a new shape layer, Photoshop will automatically start you off on a whole pixel, allowing you to create perfect lines. To turn this on:

Although snapping to pixels won’t solve every anti-aliasing problem you run into, it will at least give you a strong starting point when designing with shape layers. If you continue to run into this problem, pick your Direct Selection Tool (A), grab the shape layers points and manually drag them into place. Being mindful of this will help you become more observant as a designer.

This post was more or less a reverberation of one of my previous articles, Web Design Subtleties, where the attention to detail is major play in making a design really sing.

If you like to learn more about anti-aliasing, click here.