Follow these guidelines to create good screenshots:
Before making a screenshot set your desktop background color to RGB 44/54/64. This way if you make a screenshot round edges or any other arbitrarily shaped images are automatically filled with the correct background color, and you don’t need an extra step to retouch the image getting rid of the unwanted pixels.
Move the window that you want to capture to an area of your desktop without any background noise, like any shortcut icons lying around on your desktop. Again this will save you the hassle having to remove unwanted pixels from the image.
Press "PrtScr" on your keyboard to make a full screenshot.
Fire up your preferred image processing program (eg Photoshop), and paste (CTRL-V) the screenshot in a new image.
Mark the part of the screenshot you are interested in, and use “Image→Crop” to resize the image.
Use “Image→Trim” as an additional step to get rid of any unused borders, and that way resize to image to the minimal required size.
Optional: Add the image of a cursor, to indicate where exactly the user should click. You can download the cursor here
Most of the images do not need to be displayed in their full resolution. They can be easily shrunk to 75% of their resolution, still retaining full information. Do so by selecting “Image→Image Size...”, in there enter the new size of the image (75% of its original size), and use “Bicubic” image re-sampling, which delivers the best result.
Warning: Unfortunately “bicubic” sampling does have a nasty side effect: it adds slightly off-colored pixels in the corners of the resized image. You need to remove those pixels, otherwise the image shows up with a thin bright (barely noticeable) border.
Save the image as a jpg to your harddisk. Use high image quality when saving.
Upload the image to wiki, using the “Add Image and other files” button when editing images.
howto\adding-screenshots.txt · Last modified: 2012/02/26 22:17 by erwin-cs
