Resizing Screen Captures

I am currently writing a manual for an upcoming software package, as part of the manual I am using screenshots(of course), some of them are full screen shots that I need to resize in order for them to be able to fit on the page. The problem is that when I make them smaller, I am losing all quality of the captue....the lines rasterize severely and the text in the capture becomes unreadable. I am have tried capturing the shots as .gif, .jpg and .bmp...all seem to produce comparable (horrible looking) results when they are re-sized.to fit in the space I need to place them in.


I am sure other people have experienced this frustration...What do I need to do?

Thanks in advance,
Sean

Would it be possible to crop the images instead of resizing them? Any time you reduce the size of an image it will lose quality. How much are you reducing them? You could post before and after pics so we could tell you if the quality loss is abnormal or just something you'll have to live with.

Thanks for the reply. I may be able to post some before and after, but first I am going to try a few experiments!! I will let you know the results. I am aware that resizing captures is not recommended, but I may have to do it anyway. Right now I am in the planning stage, so I have some time to try some different approaches. Thanks for the speedy reply.

I make screenshots, too, and they seem to look ok for print in my company's workflow, maybe this will help.

open your screen capture in photoshop, then resize it with the resample box clicked off (image>image size). This shrinks the physical size, but increases the dpi from the 72 dpi to whatever you like. As typical, the higher you go, the better your print looks.

Also, maybe try several degrees of unsharp mask to your resized screenshots, that might help, too.

good luck

Thanks to Utopian, I have started resizing "screen caps" (and screen caps only) within a page layout program.... and get much better results than resizing in Photoshop. As a general rule, If you scale down a screen cap any in Photoshop "instant fuzz"

In the past I have used a small Gaussian blur to combat this...

Guassian Blur

Then EDIT>IMAGE SIZE>

And scale it down.

Then unsharp mask

That works pretty well...

but like I said Utopain gave me the tip a while back that better results could be obtained by scaling down inside the page layout program... and it works.

You may want to try bringing down your screen res to its lowest then taking the screen caps. So like right click on the desktop and click properties. Then click settings, and bring the resolution bar to the very left, whatever one is before 800x600. Take your screen capture and try resizing, it might help, might not. The reason I say this is becuase when windows takes the screen cap, it takes it at the res you are set at. So if you have it at 1280x1024, you will get a huge screen capture and when it is resized will look more ****ty than if you took it at 800x600 or whatever.