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Re: Is Photoshop a good tool for screenshots?(long)
Subject:Re: Is Photoshop a good tool for screenshots?(long) From:CHRISTINE ANAMEIER <CANAMEIE -at- email -dot- usps -dot- gov> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 6 May 2002 11:45:02 -0400
I wrote:
> In my experience, there's a significant difference between
> JPG and GIF: the compression method used in JPG is good for
> photographs and terrible for screen captures (or indeed
> anything with text).
... to which David Knopf replied:
> This is an oft repeated MYTH. Compression is optional
> with the JPEG format. Yes, if you generate highly compressed JPEGs,
> things like text and screen captures will not look good.
> However, if you generate JPEGs without compression, screen
> captures, text, and other similar elements will look excellent.
My next question is, why would you want to?
I just did an experiment with a fairly typical screenshot. Saved in GIF format,
it was 18K. Saved as JPG with the highest quality setting, it was 154K. Saved
with a quality of "10-Maximum," the lowest setting I found marginally acceptable
(I could detect compression artifacts if I looked closely), it was 118K.
That adds up fast if you're using a lot of graphics and you need to keep the
filesize down. If you're working in an application that can handle indexed-color
images, I can't see any reason to use JPEG. I can drop that 18K GIF into my Word
doc as a GIF and get flawless image quality.
Christine
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