How to handle screenshots for print

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  • ReverendGeneral0

    I do this constantly as part of my job, here's what I do to get the best ones for print:

    Make the window as small as possible that still looks good. Eliminate as much unneeded space as you can. If you're capturing your whole screen, change your resolution to as small as makes sense.

    Capture the window/screen in whatever you use. Honestly I find PrntScrn does a fine job of capturing the entire screen.

    Open the capture in Photoshop (or paste it into a new doc if using PrntScrn). Open the Image Size dialog.

    Now here's the most important part: TURN OFF IMAGE RESAMPLING. Do not resample the image at all, this will give only let you change the print size and will adjust the DPI accordingly. Don't change the DPI.

    This will give you a razor sharp printed screen capture because it will just adjust the size at which the pixels are printed. If you start with a very large screen capture, it will make your fonts very hard to read but if you use a smaller screen cap you will be able to read everything.

    Test it out a couple times on your own printer to see. I spent a week researching this and it is the only way I've found to reliably resize screen caps for print.

    • Basically the same thing as using Nearest Neighbor as the resampling method, except you don't end up at 300 dpi.duckofrubber
    • Nearest Neighbor can introduce doubled lines and pixel artifacts at odd resize calculations. Wasn't reliable for me.ReverendGeneral
    • Hmmm... I can see that as being a potential issue.duckofrubber

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