@OP: I agree with the rest of the PSG staff guys who have already posted on this thread: I don't see anything wrong with the sharpness of the images that you've posted, however I do have some suspicions about what might be causing the problem. Some of these were already alluded to, but let me go over them in a bit more detail, and maybe give an example or two:
1) When you first type in some text into PS, it is in vector form, so you can expand it by any amount and it will always be sharp. However, as soon as you rasterize it (for any reason), it gets turned into pixels, and if you look at the rasterized version at a magnification above 100%, of course you are going to see a pixelated edge. Might your expectations for edge sharpness come from looking at the vector version (within PS), and so a rasterized version of the same text won't look as good?
2) Mr. Tom's comments to the effect that the only thing that really matters when discussing sharpness is pixel dimensions (ie, and not the pixels per inch (PPI) setting) are right on the mark. However, there are some work flow scenarios where the PPI settings indirectly influence the number of pixels present, and hence influence the sharpness / edge quality. For example, let's assume you have ten inches of rasterized text (10 characters total) at 300 ppi. So, your total text is 3000 pixels wide, and each character is 1 inch, or 300 pixels wide. Now, let's say you want to swap out one of the letters for a rasterized, one inch wide symbol you found on the web that's at a resolution of 100 ppi. One might think,
"...ahh ... this is the perfect size, it will fit right in with the other text, and I won't have to change the size at all". Well, if you try to do this, that symbol will only be 100 pixels wide instead of being 300 pixels wide like all the other characters, so PS will have to up-rez it to be the same width in inches as the other characters, and in the process, it will go soft on you.
I have the feeling that scenarios like the above are the reason you occasionally find people saying that you need to worry about PPI, even though the numbers of pixels is a much more fundamental and more straightforward way to think about the issue of sharpness.
3) @
MrTom: I don't want to derail the present discussion, but as you know, for years, I've been
harping on the fact that there are two commonly accepted, different uses of the term, "
resolution", pixel-dimensions and pixels-per-inch. Rather than introducing yet another term such as
"defined", I strongly feel that much confusion would be avoided if the word,
"resolution" was almost always be replaced by either the term,
"pixel-dimensions" or
"pixels-per-inch", as appropriate to the particular context. So, in your post when you used the term,
"defined", I suspect that you were simply hunting for a colloquial, and easy-to-understand term, but IMHO, introducing a new term such as this just doesn't help clarify such matters in people's minds and it's always better to simply and explicitly state which of the two technical meanings you are talking about. Just my $0.02.
4) The concept of bit depth was mentioned in the very first post in this thread and then the conversation moved away from this. To reiterate / elaborate on what MrTom said, bit depth has absolutely nothing to do with sharpness: it merely tells one how many different gray levels or different colors are available for use.
HTH,
Tom M
.
