Fill not good enough

[gluepack]

For a start, having used X6 for a while, I am disappointed with the way that X7 handles materials. Perhaps, I am missing something but where are "Red," "Green," etc. now? (Update: Oh sorry, names weren't available before, must be thinking of CorelDraw, but at least the primaries were easily accessible in the left column of the palette matrix and they aren't now. Oh, further UPDATE: lol, if I right click I get my primaries plus recently used.) Also, when I have a color as foreground or background and click on it, in order to change to another color, why do I get this Material Properties window come up with a big circle completely the same color as I just clicked on and no other color to choose from?(UPDATE: Oh, lol, I guess that only happens with Black and with White but why?)

pspx7colors.JPG (22.45 KiB) Viewed 1909 times

Anyway, they are just side issues. What I really want to know is whether I can improve how fill works. The attached is a font character which is then filled with a pattern. As all the character detail is in black, why do I get white pixels between it and the pattern and can I improve on it without having to do something manually?

[LeviFiction]

You get white pixels because of anti-aliasing.

Anti-aliasing is (and this is going to be a horrible description) how you get an image full of tiny squares to look like it has smooth edges. Essentially, you have squares of white, grey, and black, packed really close together.

So when you filled in the pattern you were replacing white, but the darker white(grey) squares were not replaced. Of course if they had been replaced the text might have looked blockier.

One option is to set the threshold to a higher value on the fill tool. This will get both white and not quite white colors.

Another option you might consider is leaving the text as a vector, and just using the pattern fill as the background material.

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I'm working on a tutorial on the new materials palette. Don't know if it'll help or not but I hope to have that up this weekend.

[gluepack]

Thanks for that.

Yes I understood the anti-aliasing I just didn't notice it on the tool bar (yes, I know, it is pretty obvious).

As far as what I wanted to do, in this instance, sharp anti-aliasing and a tolerance of 200 on the fill works well enough (by the way, it was set to 150 on the image that I posted). If the character was in any other color than black, I guess that might pose a problem, or not? I'm not sure if the blend mode makes any difference, I just used normal.

I wasn't sure about your last suggestion as I assumed the gradation that is causing the problem currently would make it worse due to the lack of tolerance that is present in the first approach. However, I guess that there is gradation of transparency too (?) as it certainly does look better and with both sharp and smooth anti-aliasing in this case.

So, I guess the answer is to use smooth anti-aliasing, create the character on two different layers with a smaller stroke width on the lower level character and then fill that one, then merge down from the other one. Or is there a quicker way?

Thanks again.

[LeviFiction]

My last suggestion was to let PSP handle the rendering. By setting the background color on the materials palette to the pattern you want to use. And just keeping the text as a vector. Means that PSP will render the stroke on top of the fill so anti-aliasing will blend with the pattern background not the white background. You don't have to worry about tolerance settings then. It also lets you go back and change your mind later.

[gluepack]

Ahhh... lol!

Sorry, using a different font I now understand, but that doesn't work with the particular font that I am using (Aerosol).

font difference.JPG (24.84 KiB) Viewed 1840 times