how get better resolution?

[aparente001]

I want to take a screenshot of a portion of http://www.apachefri...mpp-windows.html#641.  My ultimate goal is to include it in a wordpress page, and there the image should be 350 px wide.  Here are the choices I have thought of:

1. zoom out in the browser until I can fit the body into a 350 px wide Captor fixed frame; upload it to WordPress and insert it in full size.

2. leave the browser at 100% and make the capture at a lot more pixels.  Now I can resize the image with Captor, an editor such as irfanview or photoshop, or within the wordpress software.

What would give me good results (clear type, reasonable load time) but also give me a good workflow?

I have been saving my captures as png.

I know I've posted several questions today (sorry!), but this one is higher priority than the others.  Thanks.

[mouser]

Screenshot Captor has some features designed specifically for this kind of use (especially the new beta version, which allows you to configure your own favorite "size presets" for use in resizing and thumbnailing options).

The thumbnail feature is your friend.

So my suggestion is to capture a larger region (either do a whole screen capture and then crop or do a selected region), and then use the Thumbnail feature of SC to get it to the exact size you want using a resizing-filter that makes it look the sharpest.

Use the "File -> Create Thumbnail" menu to bring up the thumbnailer options form and experiment:


Once you get the thumbnail options to look the best and the right size, in the future all you have to do is push the Thumbnail button on the toolbar to apply them to a new image.

Let me know how it works out for you.

[aparente001]

The screenshot above looks just like what I'm aiming for, but my attempts to use the thumbnail feature look much worse.  And it seems to me that by definition, a thumbnail is going to be less sharp than the original.

[mouser]

Try changing the Smoothing filter options in the thumbnail dialog.

[aparente001]

I discovered a special effect called "add shadow to entire image" almost all the way down the menu, and I like the shadow.

I tried capturing at 700 px wide and inserting in Word to get a quick look at it in a document.  I reduced it by half, and it looks much better than the next capture I took, at 350 px wide (with the browser zoomed out appropriately).

I also tried resizing the capture in Captor, 50% with bicubic fitting, and the results were not as good as the 350 px wide original capture (judging by how it looked inserted in Word -- which of course is not the ultimate test of how it will look on the web).

So for now, I'm planning to take my captures as large as I can and then let WordPress scale them to a uniform size.

[tomos]

I tried capturing at 700 px wide and inserting in Word to get a quick look at it in a document.  I reduced it by half, and it looks much better than the next capture I took, at 350 px wide (with the browser zoomed out appropriately).

-aparente001 (February 25, 2013, 12:35 PM)

I'm used to working in dpi which is a different approach (thinking more for printing).
I might well be wrong here, but I believe that if you 'reduce' it thus in word, the image file is not actually being reduced. Well I'm not sure what you're doing with Word, but if it was simply saved as a word doc, it would show the image smaller size with higher resolution which AFAIK means it's not modifying the image at all. If you're doing html in word, try saving the final product and check how it looks in browser.

[mouser]

I'm planning to take my captures as large as I can and then let WordPress scale them to a uniform size.

Wordpress cannot do a better job of resizing than Screenshot Captor -- so if it's looking better in wordpress it's because you aren't using the right settings to resize in Screenshot Captor, or because you are resizing once in screenshot captor and then again in Wordpress and the interaction is causing artifacts.

[aparente001]

Well, I haven't done experiments with wordpress yet -- I was using a quick insert into Word to predict what would happen in wordpress.

If you look at the apachefriends site, the font they're using is very ugly, and my screenshots do awful things to the letters.

What I originally wanted to do was choose a frame size of 350 px wide, zoom my browser in or out as needed so the portion of the site I want to capture fits nicely into that frame, do the capture, save the file, upload it to wordpress, and insert it into the page as a full-size image.  But when I examined the capture, I found that the letters looked awful.  I will try to make an attachment of part of it so you can see what I mean.

I got better results when I zoomed the browser to make the subject take up more space on the screen and then captured at 700 px wide.  But then when I reduced it down with the thumbnail feature, it got very yucky indeed.  I used bicubic.  I don't know what would be the best fitting algorithm to choose.  I was saving pngs.