clarebear

Well I am new here and this is my first post. Anyway, I made a shape with the "Polygonal Lasso Tool" and the edges are rough and I am wanting to know of a way to smooth out the roughness so I have good looking edges.

If you can give me some tips or advice. Thank you.

retired_paddza

Hey, you're not new here by any chance are you!? Welcome to PSG!

As for "rough" edges. It's hard to say exactly what to do without seeing them, but I'll take a couple guesses.

1. You're using polagonal lasso tool, so you are getting sharp corners. Don't do that. Use the pen tool to make smoother shapes.

2. You've got "anti-aliasing" turn off and you're getting jaggedy pixelated edges to your diagonals and curves. Turn "anti-aliasing" on.

3. You've made a selection with your tools... made a new layer... filled it with a color... changed your mind and filled again... and again and... Don't do that. Once you fill, the anti-aliasing won't be filled again and you'll end up with edge artifacts. Either undo to recolor or turn off your selection and lock transparency.

Hopefully one of those will clear up the "rough edges" problem. If not, post a picture for us to look at to see what's actually going on.

Sandy

Another to get smooth edges would be to turn your selection into an alpha channel, gaussian blur it a little, and then adjust the levels to "sharpen" it again....
After that you load the alpha channel and bingo, you have a smoooth selection.... =D

clarebear

Well thank you for all your help guys. I took MindBender's advice and used the pen tool but when i try to add stroke to it, I still get a rough look and it is bugging the heck ouf of me. I have used that Alpha channel technique once before and it worked on an older project I had. [righton]

huma

If you are getting jaggies when you stroke a path try setting your brush spacing to 1% instead of the default 25%. You can also try adjusting the brush hardness to assist with the anti-aliasing. Try 98%...

clarebear

Wow thank you for a prompt response.

retired_paddza

Just a thought... but make sure you're viewing your document at 100% zoom. If you view at odd zoom levels, thinks appear jaggy that aren't really. Even seasoned graphic artist fall into that pit now and again *guilty look* heh.

clarebear

It was at 100% I assure you.

berk10

Sometimes if I want to cheat a little, I select the negative space (empty area around the image with rough edges), go to select, feather, about 1 pixel or 2, then hit delete one or twice. this gives me good results...depending. Sometimes it may take to much of the origonal image away, but it will soften the eges still!

I fyou fill a selection with the paint bucket tool, make sure that you have Anti-aliased selected for this tool too, not only the selection.