Photoshop CS5 brings a new feature which really blows my mind: Content Aware Fill. This means that Photoshop tries to automatically redraw a selected area how it thinks it could look like without the selected object. It works with various tools like the Spot heeling Brush. I played a little bit around with it.
I finally figured out a way to add sub-pixel hinted font-rendering to text in Photoshop. For those of you not knowing what that means, please read The Ails Of Typographic Anti-Aliasing.
The usual way, to smooth text in Photoshop, is to choose one of the different anti-aliasing techniques in the drop down menu. The downside as you know is, that the smoothing of the text is done by greyscale and not by blending different channels.
But it’s doable. And I saved my workflow as an Action. All of you can download and use it for free. But the trick has a downside, too: You receive three text-layers just for one piece of text. The reason for that is, that I needed to blend the different channels and it’s not even rasterizable.
It is still editable, but you need to edit everything three times. My recommendation: Before you run the Action, copy the layer and make one of them invisible. Then, if you need to make an edit on the subpixel-hinted text, delete it, make the edit on your old text layer and then run the Action again.
Double-click the file to load it into Photoshop. Then select your text layer and run the Action. Done. Zoom in to see the difference. Now you have font rendering how it actually is.
This technique is great for your concepts when you want to simulate actual text in your Photoshop file (e.g. on a new blog template or so). This was what I had in mind as the most common use. But in some cases, when the output device has screen-rotation, the pre-defined sub-pixel hinting shouldn’t be applied (to images). So: Just for your concepts when you want to see text like the system renders it, but not for images you use in a final project (e.g. I didn’t use sub-pixel hinting for this Download button).
Unlike Flash or Silverlight, which are presentational and therefore deliver a fixed view for users to experience, the Web’s native HTML only describes content semantically, so users and their browser can interpret how they want to experience that information.
HTML supports flexible presentation using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a technology that can scale Web content and complexity to accommodate the limitation of mobile devices, accessibility issues for the blind or physically impaired, or simply customize information presentation to fit the desires of Web users.
Morgan Adams, an interactive content developer with a lot of experience with Flash recently explained that most of today’s existing Flash-based games, navigation elements, and other content is oriented toward mouse-centric desktop and simply can not work well in a multitouch environment like the iPhone or Apple’s upcoming iPad, where there is no mouseover.
Adobe is working to push out new enhancements to Flash to accommodate touch-centric environments in new content, but developers have to weigh whether sticking with Adobe’s platform makes sense now that HTML5 delivers much of the functionality of Flash without dependance upon Adobe. Apple’s staunchly Flash-free mobile platforms are helping to tilt that decision in favor of open standards.
via AppleInsider.
Read also my own article on that topic.