[thelist] Screen Captures

[aardvark]

> From: "Derry Talvainn" <derry at artema.com.au>
[...]
> Anyone know of a way to reduce the size of a screen capture without
> making the text look bad?

the text will be resampled, no matter what you do... part of the bicubic
interpolation method requires that pixels get averaged as you downsample, so
letters won't map to individual pixels anymore... they will instead 'smear'
across multiple pixels...

you could use nearest neighbor, for example, instead of bicubic, but that won't
help you...

instead, determine your final desired size...  let's say you need a screen
capture to display at 200x200 pixels...  you want to (ideally) reduce an image
size to 25% of its original size to maintain the most clarity (4 pixels get
crammed into one -- square to smaller square), and failing that, by 50% if
possible (2 pixels get crammed into one, but it's a rectangle getting stuffed
into a square, so it's not as good)... other percentages require even more odd
shape cramming, resulting in less ideal images...

so get your browser window to 800x800, do the cap, and resample to
200x200 (or 25%) from there...

you may want to run an unsharp mask filter on it to clean up the edges of
some things, but that might not be necessary...

> My first attempt at screen capturing was to use Print Screen and paste
> into Photoshop - but that was awful even at 100%. Then I found the
> CorelCapture utility which does a great job at 100% but that is all. I
> have tried reducing the size in Photoshop, Photopaint and also with
> CorelCapture all to no avail.
[...]

i use alt+PrtScrn to get the current window, and it's worked wonderfully for me
for a long time...  make sure that in Photoshop you're viewing the image as
pixels at actual size (100%), so every pixel in the image is mapped to a
screen pixel...

there's no need to get a utility for what you want to do, you can do it all with
alt+PrtScrn (you're on windows) and Photoshop... a little advance planning
and window sizing will take care of the rest...

and if you need to get your window to the right size and don't feel like
downloading Screen Ruler:

javascript:resizeTo(800,800);

where the 800,800 is your 800x800 window size (or whatever number you
want)...