Font size isues

[Thornton]

I haven't been on this website for rather a long time, but hopefully I'll get here a bit more regularly now.

I am currently uploading photos online with the larger dimension at about 2048 pixels, and I am adding my name discretely at bottom left or right. I am using PSE for this, and am very confused, because the font size seems utterly erratic. Sometimes 12 point text is big enough, sometimes even 36 point text is so tiny as to be unreadable. At other times the same point value will result in huge text. Given that the images I'm adding text to are generally 2048 pixels wide and that PSE seems to remember the text size point value from the previous editing session, I can't understand what is going on. Help please!

[xpatUSA]

I am currently uploading photos online with the larger dimension at about 2048 pixels, and I am adding my name discretely at bottom left or right. I am using PSE for this, and am very confused, because the font size seems utterly erratic. Sometimes 12 point text is big enough, sometimes even 36 point text is so tiny as to be unreadable. At other times the same point value will result in huge text. Given that the images I'm adding text to are generally 2048 pixels wide and that PSE seems to remember the text size from the previous session, I can't understand what is going on. Help please!

To where on-line are you uploading your ~2048px-wide images?

What type of file do you upload - JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc.?

Can you provide links to a couple of representative images?

For now, I can only comment that, once text has been applied to an image, it should not be variable in size relative to the width of the image. If it is variable, then the image type is not simple but instead has the text somehow separate, as in maybe XCF, PSD, SVG, etc.

A thought: Are you adding the text so that it "looks right" to a review image that is not at 100% zoom and THEN re-sizing the image for uploading? That would do it ...

[Thornton]

Thank you Ted. I am cropping some of my images but not all of them, then changing all of the images to 2048px longest side for the web, then adding a frame of about 60px, and then adding my name. It is during this PSE editing stage that the very variable text size issue appears. Web display seems fine. It is getting the size consistent during the editing stage that has me stumped.

All photos are raws developed with DxO PhotoLab and exported as TIFF, then generally tweaked with Nik filters accessed via PSE. I re-size to 2048px before adding a frame and my name. After this is done the TIFF is flattened and saved as JPEG.

Julian

[xpatUSA]

Thank you Ted. I am cropping some of my images but not all of them, then changing all of the images to 2048px longest side for the web, then adding a frame of about 60px, and then adding my name. It is during this PSE editing stage that the very variable text size issue appears. Web display seems fine. It is getting the size consistent during the editing stage that has me stumped.

All photos are raws developed with DxO PhotoLab and exported as TIFF, then generally tweaked with Nik filters accessed via PSE. I re-size to 2048px before adding a frame and my name. After this is done the TIFF is flattened and saved as JPEG.

Julian

Thanks Julian. So much for my thought. Years since I've used PSE although I've still got a Version 6 CD. Someone here can likely help better than I.

"After this is done the TIFF is flattened" is a little bothersome to my simple mind, implying that there were layers in the TIFF.

This looks ominous:

https://wiki.panotools.org/TIFF#Layers

I blame DxO, of course ...

[Manfred M]

Julian - the point system refers to absolute size of a character used in typography. A point is 1/72 of an inch in desktop publishing, so a 1" tall character would be 72 points, a 1/2" tall character would be 36 points, a 1/4" character would be 18 points, etc.

These characteristics are somewhat meaningless when we display on screen as we often try to show our images so that they scale up to a relatively large portion of the screen, so these different font sizes will vary, depending on how we have resized our image on the screen. An image that has been severely cropped with text on it will have the text looked extremely large, whereas on the comes from a high resolution camera that has not been cropped at all will look relatively small.

Screen size comes into play as well; something will look large on a large computer screen, but will look tiny (and potentially almost invisible) on a smart phone display.

I rarely use text on images that are displayed on screens outside of publishing / display functions (PowerPoint presentations, for example, where internal scaling takes care of this reasonably well) and for the rare cases that I do, I convert the font into a SmartObject. I don't know if this functionality is supported in Photoshop Elements (PSE), it is definitely supported in Photoshop. I will scale the SmartObject to fit the full screen size of the image I am displaying. That generally works out reasonably well.

[Thornton]

Thanks Ted
Julian

[Thornton]

Thank you Manfred. What you say about the SmartObject has jogged my memory. I saw a video online about watermarking. It applies to Affinity Photo, which I have. I don't think PSE can do it. It involves making a file, which resides in a documents folder and which can be "placed" into a TIFF in Affinity. The text can then be made any size one wishes, without losing resolution. I think this will serve my purposes in the absence of full PS.

Julian

[Manfred M]

The text can then be made any size one wishes, without losing resolution.

The only restriction is that not being a text file, you can't just edit it to make changes. I did my logo in Adobe Illustrator and imported it.

I'll have to check out Affinity. The last time I looked it, I don't think it supported Smart Objects, but it has been quite some time since I looked.

[davidedric]

I'm pretty sure that with the Elements XXL plugin, PSE will support Smart Objects