| General Category > General Discussion |
| Need a font but don't wanna pay for it? |
| (1/1) |
| wiggy:
No, I'm not gonna tell you where to get pricey fonts for free. Buuut, here's a crafty trick if you need to get a high(ish) res title for a cover that you're making without purchasing said pricey fonts. 1st, if you can't figure out which font you need, go to this site: http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ The way to get the best results is to take a sample of the font that you need to identify (the more characters you can upload for identification, the better). Here's a little tutorial: Here's your crusty, blurry, noise-ridden original (this is actually a really good scan that I mucked up for this tutorial) You're gonna want to horizontally align the type (if needed). Add some guides, copy and paste the body of text, then transform it until it lines up with the horizontal guides. You'll want a black and white image that's as clear as possible for this process. Here's how to get there: Copy and paste your cleaned up text into a new file (select all, copy, new, and paste. This will give you a window that's already the exact size of the item you just copied to the clipboard) Save it (as a PNG preferably, since it's lossless and will provide a small file size that uploads quickly) Then, after that's all done, you wanna got to: http://www.itcfonts.com/ Upload you file then proceed to this screen where you need to manually identify the characters in the file. You can see that it thinks the "O" in Mario is lower case. Make sure to fix things like that before moving on (I didn't because I already know what font it is and it still gives me the closest match that I'm gonna find on the site) Looks close enough for me! Select and copy the name of the font then go to: http://www.itcfonts.com/ Enter a search for the font that you need. In this case Chubbét Regular Italic (you'll have to italicize it on your own, since the italic version isn't available on the site. It takes 2 seconds in Photoshop to do so). Then click "Try it first click here!" on the right. Next, place whatever letters you need in the box labeled, um, "Place your text here!" Duh. Select the size you want to see the font in (The 200-250 point range is about as big as you can go without it creeping outside the preview box, which should be enough for our purposes 99% of the time). There's your preview, now just right click on the letter that's in the preview box and click "view image" and when it pops up, go ahead and save ;) Now it's just a matter of placing at the letters into Photoshop and arranging/scaling/coloring them. It's a bit tedious, but it's free and it works. Hope this helps you guys and gals! Here's a quick preview of how clean something can get with some patience. I'm rebuilding the entire SMB1 cover with vector lines in order to make a large poster for the ol' man cave ;) Of course, if the image is pretty clean in the 1st place, then you most likely don't have to go through some or all of the cleanup steps at the beginning. I just wanted to cover as many bases as possible. There will of course be fonts that won't show up in the system, especially the really stylized titles of many 90's era games. That's a whole other ball of wax, and can be EXTREMELY time consuming to resolve (trust me, I've rebuilt quite a few logos/title from scratch in Illustrator. It's not for the inexperienced or anyone who just needs a quick fix). |
| irvgotti452:
I've done this before in the past aswell ;). For my gameboy template. |
| wiggy:
Nice! It's rather round-about, but hey, it works ;) |
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