Stats checking

Yesterday afternoon I wrote a blog post for my photo tips website, and then I spent the evening finding relevant photos to illustrate it.

This morning I was just finishing the article off. For one of the images I had added text with some perspective distortion. I had done this by adding a type layer, converting it to a smart object, then using the perspective transform. (Perspective transform is not available for text layers in Photoshop).

But I noticed that the text nearest (that is, the part where the text is largest) was looking a bit pixelated and ugly. So this morning I was trying various things to try and correct this. I tried enlarging the size of the smart object that contained the text, then transforming the object layer back down in size. But that didn't work.

I tried using the 3D tools in Photoshop. But I couldn't see how to perspective distort the text using those tools.

I tried using the type warp option, but couldn't achieve an effect that looked correct.

Then finally I found the answer. You have to convert the type layer to a shape layer. Then you can use perspective distort, and the layer maintains it's vectoriness so it still looks good.

For most of the rest of the day I was checking my web stats. Extremely tedious, but needs to be done.

In the evening I played on Civ IV for a bit, which I haven't played in ages. Amazingly no-one's declared war on me yet. (I nearly always use a tactic of just building lots of improvements in my cities rather than building units to defend / attack).