OK, I know so little about digital photography and Pic editing in general. I'm trying to make some quality screenshots for my website. I'm using the latest version of "Snag It" to capture the screen. My question is, what settings contribute to getting a High resolution screen shot?
Here's an example of a pro tools session:
I'm not happy with the quality. I'm sure there's a way to do a better job.
A true full-screen screenshot should be at exactly the same resolution & quality of your screen because it should take the image straight from the screen buffer.
From there:
-don't reduce the resolution unless you need to (i.e. 'scale' the image), only crop
-If your image doesn't include any detailed photography or other elements with many colours, use a PNG file format.
JPEG works by tessellating shapes, which works okay for busy photographs but you loose edge-definition. PNG is more like a bitmap (and I like it for other reasons like supporting alpha channel) but most importantly it uses a colour table, so the less colours used in your image the smaller the file size! most GUI graphics consist of a limited number of colours so this generally works okay for screenshots of program windows, etc.
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All sreen caps are at (roughly) 72dpi. You can increase the dpi in photoshop to say 150. But on a website (which is on screen so it's 72dpi) will not be able to display 150 dpi in better quality - it will just want to display at double the size...
My 2 cents, your using the wrong file format. JPG by design will try blend pixels together which in turn leaves you with an image that's not so sharp. Text can look very fuzzy.
Screen shots with text are normally best when saved as PNG files. This will produce razor sharp images, and there are still keep the files sizes down too by using pallet based options when saving the png.
