# High Quality Screen Capture?



## overdrawnprocess (May 11, 2007)

I use IrfanView ( I know hurrah lol but I dont use images that much)

but I have Adobe Photoshop CS3 (not sure what the cs3 stands for)

Anyway is there any way for me to take a high quality screenshot?


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

With just about any screenshot tool, the format makes a difference. Are you talking about that actual mechanics of how to take one, or just how to get good quality?

If you use high resolution and a non-compressed format, like bmp, you will get the best quality (and largest file size).


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## overdrawnprocess (May 11, 2007)

Thanks. I know how to do it I just wanted to know for best quality yea. Should I paste it into adobe and save it as a .jpeg?


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## hewee (Oct 26, 2001)

Take a screen shot and save save it as .png, .bmp, .tif. If you want the best then stay away from .jpg.


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

Jpeg's are an excellent format that keep a great deal of image information without too much distortion. But they are compressed, which means that some image information has been removed to make them smaller. That makes them ideal for the internet since they are smaller and load faster. But when you enlarge them, you will see quite clearly that they are nowhere near as good as bmp's or another format that actually keeps the data for every, single pixel. Once you convert to jpeg, you have lost image information forever. For best quality and for image manipulations, keep the uncompressed formats.


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## Noyb (May 25, 2005)

A screen shot captures the picture going to your monitor.
If your screen resolution isn't set to the maximum your monitor allows ...
You can increase the resolution of the screen shot by setting to the max. allowed.

It'll be the same if you paste to Irfanview or Photoshop.

For many Screen shots .. such as computer screens .. saving as a gif image works great.
This will be less colors .. and typically a smaller file size .. But it won't have the jpeg noise around sharp edges such as text.
This usually gives a cleaner picture.

For most of my uploads of computer screen shots to TSG .. I use gif ..
then I don't have to worry about jpeg compression distortion and it usually fits the file size limit.

If it's a picture with lots of colors .. I'll use a low compression jpg .. or a maybe bmp.


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## Soundy (Feb 17, 2006)

IrfanView has a built-in screen-capture function, but the quickest and easiest way to do it is just to use the PrintScreen key. Hitting PrintScreen by itself will snapshot the entire desktop to the clipboard, while Alt-PrintScreen will capture just the foreground window.

From there you can open IrfanView (don't laugh, it's an excellent program), or whatever other program you want, and use Ctrl-V to paste the screen snapshot from the clipboard.


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## hewee (Oct 26, 2001)

Faststone lets you save .png files..
B&W, 256 or 16M colors.
It has a compress from none-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-max and I thing 6 is what it is set at to start with.
But saving a 16 M color screen shot of the web page here at none is 2,197KB and at Max is 48KB.
The 6 I keep it at it is 49KB.

I be darn if I can tell on some thing like this web page because they both look the same and I am zooming in also and look at how much the file size went down and I can't tell from looking at it that I compressed it from 2,197KB to 48KB for a 1260x594 image.

Now on some pictures with lots of colors and detail the file size on a .png will get a lot bigger but it does a great job set at 6 and I save all at 6 .png now.
The same thing saves as a .jpg I has to compress it all the way down to 26 to get the 49KB file. That is 100 not compress and the lower number the more it is compress. That same .jpg looks very bad.

http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

Note: This program has become Shareware and is no longer free. The last freeware version (5.3) can be downloaded here:
( http://www.freewarearena.com/html/Downloads/details/id=1993.html )


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## glentibbits (Jan 24, 2009)

CS3 means Creative Suite, 3rd revision.


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