best snapshot program

[EHM-1366 Themis]

Godd evening all,

I use HoverSnap and FSScreeen for taking screenshots with my FS9. FSScreeen is good but the bitmaps are too large to send to the screenshot page. The Hoversnap solves this problem and I can chose resolution and the size of the file but I cannot make clear pictures, eventhough at my old pc with fs2002 it worked fine.
Can anyone thing of the reason?  Does it haveto do with the resolution I use 1280x1024?

Fly safe!

[EHM-1539 Pierre]

Hi Themis,
Jpeg compression is good, but you need to set a proper setting.
The best ratio quality / size is obtained around 85%
Below 80% the quality decreases for ridiculous size saving, and above, the size drastically increases without an obvious gain of quality.
It should be better if you can change it in hoversnap.
Otherwise, you can take screenshots with FSscreen, and use a freeware like xnview to batch convert the bitmaps to jpegs with a very good quality compression.

[EHM-1366 Themis]

The problem with FSScreen is that it doesn't convert the resolution to 800x600, it makes it 800x620, no matter what I do! So it cannot be uploaded to the screenshots page.

[EHM-0654 Murray]

Themis,

FSScreen captures at whatever resolution your desktop/FS200X is set to (2560x1024 in my case). There are plenty of image editing tools out there that will allow you to resize/crop down to 800x600 - Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro being the "big two".

[EHM-0641 Rico]

So does PAINT

[EHM-0654 Murray]

Never took you for a masochist Rico

Strictly speaking, you *can* use paint for such things, but it's not the easiest piece of software to use for it...

[EHM-1001 Robert]

If you setted the correct resolution, adjust the compression ratio so the image will not overrun 150 kByte, being another limit on the SSL gallery.

[EHM-1671 Ben]

I used paint for all the screenshots I've taken, but they're too big to upload onto the EHM screenshot gallery. What do I do?

[EHM-0654 Murray]

Ben,

Best thing I can suggest is get yourself a copy of a reasonable image editting suite (older copies of Paint Shop Pro often turn up on magazine cover disks here in the UK) and use that to "repack" your JPEGs. I was using PSP 7 for a long while, and only upgraded to 10 recently.

Visually high quality JPEGs at a resolution of 800x600 and file size below 150KB are easily achievable, especially if you are willing to sacrifice colours and hold them to a 256-colour (color palette.

EDIT: In the word's of Reeves & Mortimer's character Greg Dickson, "No, no, no, what am I saying..."; there is, of course, the entirely free (if a little flakey, last time I used it under Windows, but that was well over a year ago) GIMP - http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/