RE: Why JPGs for screen captures? test results

["Anameier, Christine A - Eagan, MN" <CANAMEIE -at- email -dot- usps -dot- gov>]

Greg, thanks for posting your results. The file sizes you posted were
useful information. (I was surprised to see that TIFFs tend to be as
large as BMPs, which are typically huge.) 

And as you point out, it matters what application you resize the image
in. I've been corresponding offlist with someone today and we were
discussing resizing images in Word. In my experience, if you insert an
image in Word, resize it in Word, and print it, it usually looks fine;
if you resize it somewhere else and THEN insert it into Word and print
it, it looks crummy; if you resize it *anywhere* and convert it to
PDF.... <shudder>.

I have to ask, though--why didn't you compare image quality at 100%
rather than just looking at the images you resized?

> Clarity of resulting image (original ommitted for obvious resons)
> Photoshop reduced images
> PNG illegible
> GIF illegible
> JPG illegible
> TIF illegible*Best print quality
> BMP illegible

All the reduced images were illegible. But what about the un-resized
images? There would be significant differences between them in these
different formats (in quality and/or size).

A lot of people seem to think in terms of resized images because a
full-screen capture is just too big for the page or the screen. But
resized images are usually awful no matter what we do. Whenever
possible, I crop screen captures and just show part of the screen at
100% size. The occasional full-screen shot is just for context, so the
blurriness is tolerable then. 

I've seen books with what appear to be full-screen captures crystal
clear and neatly nestled within the page margins, but I'm assuming that
their combination of software and printing apparatus is a little more
adaptable than my standard "Word+Acrobat+600dpi laser printer" combo. I
can mumble my way through discussions of GIF and JPG compression
algorithms, but when it comes to the voodoo of how various DTP/word
processing programs handle graphics, I'm at a loss for explanations.

Christine


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