Vector Buttons
These solutions arefor vector button
only.
Opinion? Ideas?
Leave a comment! Six Ways to Fix Fuzzy Button Edges in Photoshop
Photoshop’s primitive tools (rectangles, rounded rectangles, etc) are really handy for creating scalable buttons, but depending on their initial size, you might get a little fuzziness around the edges.
That left side looks a little fuzzy
What’s really weird is the size of the initial graphic seems to dictate whether the fuzziness will appear or not. I’ve seen fuzziness at 24 pixels tall but not at 30 and even then the width can make a difference – not seeing a pattern, yet. However, since projects might require buttons of any size, you can’t force a height or width, so here are a few ways to work around this issue:
- Masks
Cut out the bad parts, basically. Works good for straight edges. - Add an outside stroke
Requires a bit of planning to deal with the extra height and width, but sometimes you can simply cover up the fuzziness. - Turn down the volume with a light pencil and a mask
In rounded corners, this can make things look even smoother. Create a mask and switch your foreground color to black. Choose the pencil tool, but turn the opacity way down. Keep penciling the rough areas until the roundness is complete. Be cautious not to lose the color diversity or your round corners can look pixelated and generally worse. - Pencil in the fuzziness
Sometimes the blurry spots are on the inside of the graphic. Since the fuzziness seems to be consistently 1 pixel wide (or tall, depending on where it appears), try using the pencil tool to fill in the appropriate color. - Add an inner glow
For inner ghosting, an inner glow may do the trick. Also inner glows often add a nice real world feel. - Add an outer glow
If you have the room and it doesn’t clash with your aesthetic, play a bit with outer glows. Like inner glows and used cautiously, outer glows can also add a sense of realism to your buttons.
Just did some quick experimenting, and I believe there is a simpler solution: make sure “View > Snap” is enabled.
Photoshop’s vector drawing tools have sub-pixel precision: if your cursor is over the boundary between two document pixels when you begin drawing a rectangle, the left edge will be antialiased. You can test this theory by drawing a vector shape layer, selecting some of the points with the white arrow tool, and using the keyboard arrow keys to nudge them around. Instead of moving one pixel for each keypress like raster content, they’ll move some 1/100 of a pixel, depending on the zoom level of your view.
Laying out ruler guides, and making sure your tools are set to snap onto them is the safest route to maintaining crisp edges!
Yep. Sure enough, that does the trick!
Often I think one draws before laying out the guides – obviously not a good practice.
Thanks, Daniel!
After further experimentation, it looks like ruler guides aren’t required. Simply snapping to just about everything seems to make the vector tools respect pixel boundaries.
Are you sure? I typically keep snapping on.
Further experimentation may be required.
Just found this: it’s possible to make shape tools snap to the pixel level: http://paularmstrongdesigns.com/weblog/photoshop-tip-snap-shapes-to-pixels/
Fantastic! That’s the answer we’ve been looking for!