RE: SOLVED - blurry screen captures - Snagit for Mac (4.1.2)

Subject: RE: SOLVED - blurry screen captures - Snagit for Mac (4.1.2)
From: Syed Zaeem Hosain <Syed -dot- Hosain -at- aeris -dot- net>
To: Monique Semp <monique -dot- semp -at- earthlink -dot- net>, TechWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2017 07:36:57 +0000

Hmmm ... I don't use the Mac version, but have become confused by some comments made in this discussion.

First and foremost, Snagit simply captures what is on the screen - the color of each "captured" pixel if you will. The fact that it uses PNG format by default is because this is simply a loss-less storage format of those pixels.

So, there is no "font" inside the captured image - any "text" is simply what pixels were "shown" by the particular program that rendered that text on the screen. So, whether I show that text from Photoshop, Word, an application menu ... even Chrome or Edge ... is quite irrelevant really.

An image in PNG format does not have any concept of pixels / inch or anything like that - the image is simply a certain number of pixels in each axis. This size is influenced by the choices you make with your rendering program to begin with.

So, what works well for me is to simply increase the display of what I want to capture on my screen as reasonably large as possible ("zoom in without showing rendering artifacts").

As long as the image is rendered well for that display (whether it is a 1920 x 1200 monitor or a 4k display is not too critically important - depending on what I am capturing) in the first place, Snagit will simply capture those pixels as rendered by the underlying program.

Of course, it is mildly important that the image on the screen is not pixilated due to too much zoom - like an image from a web site designed for a low-res display. Often I am capturing from PDF renders on my screen, and since this is a vector format, zooming in often produces perfectly good images (of text renders for example) for capture.

Then I capture using Snagit with that "relatively maximized" image and proceed to crop and edit as needed.

This generally creates a decently sized captured image, meaning "a maximal number of pixels on each side of the image capture". Which (when used in FrameMaker or Powerpoint or elsewhere) provides me good visible quality - of course, FrameMaker wants to use a particular dpi when importing that image ... I just use a value large enough to give me a good fit to the frame. No blurring of the kind discussed here.

Yes, I use PNG format to store my screen captures, since it is loss-less and does not create the pixel color artifacts that JPEG does, since JPEG is designed to compress photographs that have "relatively" benign color transitions between pixels ... unlike a screen capture of something like the menu of a program. So, JPEG has a "quality" control that optimizes the compression ... too much compression and you really lose quality!

JPEG "introduces" pixels around color transitions that the human eye simply blends together - this is very bad when the image is not a photograph ... solid color lines get "blurred" by other color pixels, etc.

Never use JPEG when the image you are capturing has large sections of solid color ... like menus, charts, line drawings, and the like.

Z

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+syed -dot- hosain=aeris -dot- net -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+syed -dot- hosain=aeris -dot- net -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf Of Monique Semp
Sent: Thursday, April 6, 2017 04:17 PM
To: TechWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Subject: SOLVED - blurry screen captures - Snagit for Mac (4.1.2)

Well, I bit the bullet and spent quite a few hours today learning Snagit for Mac. It's *very* different from my Snagit for Windows version 10 (maybe the newest Windows version is similar to the Mac version, but I don't know).

The interface, for me, is the opposite of intuitive. It seemed like I was learning a totally new program. And TechSmith hasn't made it easy with their emphasis on videos instead of a well-written Help doc.

But now I've drastically simplified the workflow: take a capture, save it as <name>_capture.snagproj, save the version I'll edit as <name>.snagproj; edit to increase the canvas size (otherwise the resultant PNG doesn't include anything outside the original capture size even though you can see it all in the editor!), add a border, callout lines, and text -- I saved my styles, which are minimalistic instead of the cartoonish defaults, in a theme, which is a nice feature I hadn't used -- save the <name>.snagproj file, and Save As the PNG.

When I import the PNG into Google Docs, everything is now perfectly clear.
The only oddity is that the font really seems much smaller than it should.
Snagit says it's Arial 10 pt, but it's very small in the actual PNG. So something odd there, I'm just letting that go so I can return to creating content.

I continue to be frustrated by the inability to specify a capture resolution or specific size in Snagit for Mac, the inability to resize an image to a specific physical size (in both Google Docs and Snagit for Mac), and the lack of info about what resolution the final PNG ended up (the Finder > Get Info shows the image's *dimensions*, not resolution info, which I don't think are the same thing?). But I do have crisp images and good text/callouts with a minimum of back-and-forth between tools. So that's a giant improvement.

Hope this info helps someone,
-Monique

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Follow-Ups:

References:
blurry screen captures - Snagit for Mac (4.1.2): From: Monique Semp
RE: blurry screen captures - Snagit for Mac (4.1.2): From: Wright, Lynne
Re: blurry screen captures - Snagit for Mac (4.1.2): From: Monique Semp
SOLVED - blurry screen captures - Snagit for Mac (4.1.2): From: Monique Semp

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