Graphics Dilemma: Clear Screenshots for Web Page? Help!

["Schweda, Christopher" <CSchweda -at- ICJIA -dot- STATE -dot- IL -dot- US>]

Hi all,

My situation is this: I'm putting our documentation on-line on the
company intranet. I'm in the process of taking color screenshots of our
software in order to place them in the documentation.

I'm using Windows 95, Snagit/32 (screen capture software) and my monitor
is set to 256 colors. Snagit has been told not to reduce any colors. I
want to save the screenshots as GIFs (or JPEGs).

The rub is this: because the windows in the software are large, I need
to reduce them by about 50 percent. I've got Snagit's scale feature set
to .5. Perfect size. No prob.

But the rub is this: when I go to insert my GIF into my web page, I see
thousands of tiny little dots all over the graphic. I assume this is
because I've reduced the image and the dots are the pixels that have
been scrunched together.

My question is this: is there anyway to get rid of those dots in the
reduced image? Do I need to set my colors to 16? Do I need to set my
colors higer than 256 in order to get a higher-quality image.

I'm no graphics guru, so I have no idea what I need to do to be able to:

1) Snap clear pictures of the screen
2) Save those pictures in a reduced size without all the dots

Can anybody give me a crash course -- or, better yet some suggestions --
for taking good screenshots, saving them in the appropriate file type
(GIF? JPEG? BMP?) for insertion into a web page?

Thanks much! I'll summarize responses and post the results. I imagine
others may have (or have had) a similar dilemma.


Chris Schweda



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Christopher Schweda
Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority
120 S. Riverside Plaza, Suite 1016
Chicago, IL 60606
312.793.8968
cschweda -at- icjia -dot- state -dot- il -dot- us
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