Hi,

squareyes writes:

am making up a newbies help file for Ubuntu, but am not completely happy with the crispness of the screen shots I have taken with "gimp".

Screenshots show exactly what's on screen. If that's not crispy enough, I suggest you tweak your text rendering and perhaps choose a better hinted font.

Sven

I'm guessing that you're resizing your screenshots. Otherwise they'd be as crisp as you see them on-screen.
If you must resize, use the Unsharp tool to sharpen them again. It works quite well on textual/cartoony graphics and can be found at Filters->Enhance->Unsharp Mask.

Donncha.

squareyes wrote:

Hi all,
am making up a newbies help file for Ubuntu, but am not completely happy with the crispness of the screen shots I have taken with "gimp". Is there any way of improving them very much. May be too critical, but as it's my first work would like it to look more professional than I really am.

I can see that fuzzyness you're talking about, and it seems strange that a direct screenshot would result in that... so it may have to do with your export.

I looked at one of your PNG screenshots... opening it in Photoshop I was presented with a prompt about Pixel Aspect Ratio. The PNG's you've exported have the "PHYS" PNG chunk in them. This controls the the aspect ratio of the pixels of the image, believe it or not. I think it's supposed to give you control over how an image is viewed on different displays (crt, lcd, mobile phone, tv, etc).

Maybe this is having an effect? It certainly did when I opened it in Photoshop. After removing the PHYS chunk, the screenshot looked a lot more normal in Photoshop... but it still had a little fuzzyness.

So maybe it's the compression you're choosing for the PNG? All your PNG's are RGB... so that has lossy compression. Are you putting it down a little bit?

Since these are screenshots of applications... I would recommend outputting Indexed PNG's instead of RGB. This has some advantages in this case... like smaller file sizes (only a few colours are being used in your screenshots)... plus it uses lossless compression, so your screenshots will not get blurry.

Go to "Image/Mode/Indexed" before exporting the PNG. Reduce the colours to what you think is a little higher than what the screenshot is using... hopefully GIMP will detect unused colours and remove them. For dithering options... turn them off unless you have large areas of an image with gradients occuring.

When you export the PNG... uncheck all boxes in the PNG options, and make sure compression is maximum.

Try this stuff out, see what happens.

BTW, search for a windows utility called TweakPNG. It's a great PNG utility... it gives you control over the internal workings of a PNG.

-----Original Message----- From: gimp-user-bounces@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu [mailto:gimp-user-bounces@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu]On Behalf Of squareyes Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 4:44 AM To: gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu Subject: [Gimp-user] Crisper screen shots

Hi all, am making up a newbies help file for Ubuntu, but am not completely happy with the crispness of the screen shots I have taken with "gimp". Is there any way of improving them very much. May be too critical, but as it's my first work would like it to look more professional than I really am.

http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/squareyes/ubuntu.html

Many thanks in advance Take care
Winton

Quoting Kalle Ounapuu :

So maybe it's the compression you're choosing for the PNG? All your PNG's are RGB... so that has lossy compression. Are you putting it down a little bit?

Err, there isn't any compression in PNG that is lossy. At all. PNG is lossless
in all modes. So I'm not sure what you are talking about here.

That renders much of the rest of the e-mail incorrect.

Jeff

---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.

Yea maybe you're right. My mistake, I just automatically assumed an RGB image format would have lossy compression. I work with Indexed PNG's alot.

-----Original Message----- From: gimp-user-bounces@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu [mailto:gimp-user-bounces@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu]On Behalf Of Jeffrey McBeth
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 10:41 AM To: gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu Subject: RE: [Gimp-user] Crisper screen shots

Quoting Kalle Ounapuu :

So maybe it's the compression you're choosing for the PNG? All your PNG's are RGB... so that has lossy compression. Are you putting it down a little bit?

Err, there isn't any compression in PNG that is lossy. At all. PNG is lossless
in all modes. So I'm not sure what you are talking about here.

That renders much of the rest of the e-mail incorrect.

Jeff

---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.

Hi,
squareyes@optusnet.com.au (2005-03-02 at 2013.39 +1030):

I have taken with "gimp". Is there any way of improving them very much. May be too critical, but as it's my first work would like it to look more professional than I really am.
http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/squareyes/ubuntu.html

Are you scaling them? I ask cos the text sizes do not seem to match in all of them, and the fuzzier ones are the ones that seem to have smaller text.

Two images, same height, menu with 10 entries and 2 lines vs menu with 11 entries and 2 lines, the second being fuzzier. http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/squareyes/menu1.png http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/squareyes/menu2.png

GSR

On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 20:13:39 +1030 squareyes wrote:

Hi all,
am making up a newbies help file for Ubuntu, but am not completely happy with the crispness of the screen shots I have taken with "gimp". Is there any way of improving them very much. May be too critical, but as it's my first work would like it to look more professional than I really am.

http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/squareyes/ubuntu.html

I fiddled with the Account Management image and found that Unsharp Mask with a Radius of 0.3 and Amount of 0.5 had just about the best effect on cleaning the image up.

One thing I noticed was that the PNG was set to 97.9932 x 108.001 dpi. Those seem a little strange to me. I suspect that most monitors are between 72-85 DPI, but maybe not. The ratio of yours in ~0.92 while my LCD at home is ~ 1.02.

Screenshots should be made at screen resolution, or 72x72 by default.

Hi,

"Kalle Ounapuu" writes:

So maybe it's the compression you're choosing for the PNG? All your PNG's are RGB... so that has lossy compression. Are you putting it down a little bit?

PNG doesn't do lossy compression. Whatever compression factory you choose, it's lossless.

Since these are screenshots of applications... I would recommend outputting Indexed PNG's instead of RGB. This has some advantages in this case... like smaller file sizes (only a few colours are being used in your screenshots)... plus it uses lossless compression, so your screenshots will not get blurry.

Indexed PNGs may be smaller but they often look crappy. Simply because 256 colors are most often not enough to reproduce a screenshot.

Sven