Best format for screen shots?

[Marty Billingsley]

SimPLsol at aol.com wrote:
>
> Tom,
> Thank you for the advice.
> I have never worked with png files. I understand that they are like a "super
> GIF", similar format, more colors. Do you know if pngs are bitmaps? I would
> like a format that scales well.
All screenshot formats will be bitmaps, because they are in essence capturing
a bitmap.  Vector graphics are the ones that scale well, but screen shots
are not vector graphics.

PNG format is 24-bit color.  Its ability to have transparent pixels (like
GIFs can) is the only thing that would make it superior to TIFF format
for capturing screen shots.  But would a screen shot have any transparent
pixels?  Besides, aren't you limited to whatever format your screen shot
software is going to capture in?  You can convert to any file format after
that, but it's pretty much irrelevant because no format is going to
increase the quality of your image once it's captured.

> So far, for everyone following this thread, the most important thing I've
> learned is: keep the images full sized, if possible. Reducing the screenshots to
> 75% caused more problems than using any of the formats I've tried.
You end up with a certain number of pixels.  How you deal with them is
just like dealing with any other graphic; you can make it smaller (in inches)
and increase the resolution for printing; you can't make it bigger, for
either print or on-screen display, without losing quality and ending up
with a pixelated image.

 - marty

--
Marty Billingsley (marty at ucls.uchicago.edu)
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools