Smaller Picture worse Text quality!!!

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Smaller Picture worse Text quality!!!

I wanna put my songs on iTunes via www.tunecore.com So I created a Album Cover. It is 600x600 pixels 72 dpi. I have done it in Pages. Its good and looks perfect. But problem is when I try to look at it in the size how its gonna be on iTunes store I see that text is in poor quality. Smaller picture means more blurred text. (name of the band). So I was checking on the iTunes store on other bands and they have Texts on Album Covers in much better quality than I have.

I was trying to create it in Photoshop CS4 but no difference. Picture is good quality but as soon as I make it smaller the Text quality becomes blurry. I was trying to increase "dpi" but it doesnt help at all.

How do they do it to keep Text in good and sharp quality even on small pictures?

PowerBook G4, Mac OS X (10.5.1), 1.5 GHz PowerPC G4, 2GB DDR SDRAM , SONY HD camcorder HDR-SR12

Posted on Nov 7, 2008 12:26 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 7, 2008 12:54 PM in response to thepitcho

Pages is a poor choice for this task.

You need something like Photoshop or PixelMator to get the image, overlay the text and reduce it to size.

To keep the text as sharp as possible, you need to choose simple typefaces, usually sans serif, maybe add a drop shadow and outline to help it stand out and to save it in a format that doesn't blur it.

I suspect you maybe using .jpeg which is a good choice for the picture but a bad choice for the text as it clusters the pixels and uses an algorithm that blurs those pixels within the cluster.

You will be better off saving the picture with text as a .png file.

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