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.
Update: 26.03.2010, 1.05 am
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).
