Today I struggled with Adobe Photoshop CS2's Shape Tool. When I first mocked up a website layout for later slicing, I had nice, crisp, rounded rectangle background shapes as expected. However, after receiving some super tips from a talented graphic designer, I decided to revisit my original site layout and remove the rounded corners. I was disappointed to discover that my shape tool (rectangle in this case, but lines, circles, etc), when in the fill layer setting, was automatically anti-aliasing all my edges (not just the rounded corners as expected). I called a fellow web developer, and he saw the same results. Crisp in Fill Pixels (with option to antialias), but fill layers refused to draw crisply. Another bright designer we consulted suggested importing Illustrator ai's as smart objects...
But I wanted Fill Layers! They're there for a purpose afterall..
My Solution: It appears that CS2 has the unexpected behavior that drawing with shape tools on fill layers when zoomed in greater than 100% (or less than, too-- verified), causes the fill layer mask to automatically anti-alias! Zoom back out to 100%, and the shape draws "crisp" as expected!
See figure:
This has been verified (as of 2/5/2007) to be a problem with Adobe CS3 - beta as well. Please, please take the time to hit Adobe with a little bug report using Adobe's issue report form on-line.
Another solution
Whatever the shape – when you use
guides to which the edges of the desired shape snap, the borders of the shape are still and don't run away causing smudged borders. You have to remember to insert an <strong>integer</strong> value in the 'New Guide...' dialog box - this ensures borders to stay in between adjacent pixels. This equally concerns predefined shapes, paths and custom shapes.