How do you place screenshot images in InDesign?
Brandi Baird
Brandi Baird
Brandi Baird
Bob Levine
save as TIFF. Place the TIFF files into ID. As far as resolution goes,
there's just so much you can do with a screenshot and it really depends on
how you are going to print them.
Bob
Brandi Baird
Sandee Cohen
You can't place the screen shots directly from the clipboard into ID.
You need to use a dedicated screen shot program. Then save the images as a TIFF. Don't change the resolution.
Use ID's Place command to import the shots into the page. Then you can scale the shots smaller.
That should work.
Bob Gower
However, you can bump up the resolution as you bring down the in size in Photoshop (the newer the version the better the results) or use the Genuine Fractals plug-in for Photoshop, which does a nice job of taking resolution up while keeping the size the same (actually PShop itself is getting better at this). There may be trouble though with text and such. When your done with the resizing I'd say your best bet is saving them as and eps or tiff.
You also need to be careful how you print. Setting your image resolution at a multiple of your LPI always makes things cleaner e.g. 85LPI means you set your resolution at 255 or 340.
Hope this helps.
Olav Kvern
You can either paste the screen images into Photoshop (or other image editor), or get a screen capture program--I like SnagIt--you can download a fully functional demo version from: http://www.snagit.com/products/snagit/default.asp <http://www.snagit.com/products/snagit/default.asp>
Either way, save the screen shot as TIFF for use in InDesign. Saving it as EPS will also work, but TIFFs will display slightly faster. Once you've save the image, place it in InDesign. You can resize it there.
If the image looks "jaggy" or "low resolution" in InDesign, switch to InDesign's high resolution image display.
I wrote a column about screen capture in the old Adobe Magazine--I'll post a link to the archived PDF as soon as I find it. Adobe.com seems to be very slow right now--probably maintenence or something.
Bob--
(Respectfully) No, Windows screens are not 72 ppi (pixels per inch)--even most Mac OS screens aren't that, these days. The Windows display I'm writing on, for example, is 110 ppi--most typical displays are around 96 these days.
Screen shots, unlike almost every other kind of image, should not be resampled or compressed using lossy compression methods (such as JPEG compression--Zip and most LZW methods are fine). Every pixel counts, and lossy compression introduces artifacts that make reading text (menus, dialog boxes, etc.) in screen shots unreadable. It's OK to resize the image in Photoshop, provided no resampling takes place.
Thanks,
Ole
Ken Grace
screens aren't that, these days. The Windows display I'm writing on, for
example, is 110 ppi--most typical displays are around 96 these days. >
How do you calculate this Ole?
If I print screen and paste into PaintShop Pro, the image information window
tells me that the image is at 72 pixels/inch.
I second what you say about resampling - up to a point. Automatic quality
control at the printer fails my pages if an image is less than (I think) 256
dpi as the downward limit from an optimum 300. So where I can I resample to
prevent workflow problems (assuming the image doesn't automatically fall
above the minimum effective resolution through scaling from a large screen
capture).
I have found mixed results on screen grabs. Sometimes resampling reduces the
legibility of text in the image, sometimes it improves it. I have settled on
a process of saving the resampled screen grab as a copy and partially
overlapping it on the original image in the page to compare the perceived
quality. If the resampled image is no worse than what's there I use it, if
it is, I go with the low res version and have to accept a hiccup in the
workflow.
k
David Person
It is pretty easy to calculate. My screen is 1600x1200 (actually I have two; this is each), and is 13.75" wide. The horizontal ppi is therefore 120.
Applications always use 72 because there is no way for an application to know the physical size of your screen, so it can't do the calculation.
Most consumer displays are close to 72dpi. Us folk in the graphics world usually have higher resolution monitors.
IBM has a 17" display with over 200ppi, but it costs $22,000.
Olav Kvern
It's a little dated, at this point, but most of the information is still useful.
Thanks,
Ole
Olav Kvern
The ppi of a monitor is not only a function of the monitor, but of the video card driving it--this is particularly true of LCDs being driven by analog (rather than digital) inputs.
re: ". Automatic quality control at the printer fails my pages if an image is less than (I think) 256 dpi as the downward limit from an optimum 300. So where I can I resample to prevent workflow problems (assuming the image doesn't automatically fall above the minimum effective resolution through scaling from a large screen capture)."
Do you mean your commercial printer (a business with a printing press), or your printer (a device)?<g> Either way, I suspect the problem is the resampling that can happen if you've left InDesign's Print settings at their defaults. Take a look at the Send Data pop-up menu in the Graphics panel of the Print dialog box. Does it say Optimized Subsampling? If so, and if you want to print screen shots, set it to All.
Same deal for PDF output--don't let the PDF export filter resample/downsample/compress your screen shots. Again, the default is to allow this--it's OK for most natural images, but it's death to a synthetic image such as a screen capture.
Thanks,
Ole
Ken Grace
<Do you mean your commercial printer (a business with a printing press), or
your printer (a device)?>
This is the reprographics company that handles my magazine. The problem is
not necessarily resampling, it can just be a low res image. All PDFs in the
workflow are quality checked (using PitStop or FlightCheck) and anything
judged as being of insufficient quality is caught and analysed. Screen grabs
can fall below the threshold resolution level and so the PDFs have to be
taken out of the workflow and checked manually.
David
<Applications always use 72 because there is no way for an application to
know the physical size of your screen, so it can't do the calculation. >
So if I save a screen grab as a TIFF, and the resolution of that TIFF is
read as 72 dpi, is this then a meaningless figure? And if a page with that
TIFF on goes through FlightCheck and is shown as 72 dpi, where is
FlightCheck getting the information from.
If I scan a half tone at 300 dpi the scanner records information 300 times
for every inch and as far as I was aware, this information is part of the
image's code. Are you saying that when a screen grab is saved as a TIFF a
figure of 72 dpi is arbitrarily written in to define its resolution, even
though the actual resolution could be anything?
k
Dave Saunders
My printers also examine files with PitStop, but they've learned that the dpi of screen shots is irrelevant so they ignore those warnings.
Luckily for me, I don't have any other kind of images in my files so they don't even have to stop and think.
Dave
Olav Kvern
re: "All PDFs in the workflow are quality checked (using PitStop or FlightCheck) and anything judged as being of insufficient quality is caught and analysed. Screen grabs can fall below the threshold resolution level and so the PDFs have to be taken out of the workflow and checked manually."
I see. It's like I said in the column--"Everything You Know Is Wrong" when it comes to screen shots. You can't treat them by the same rules that work for other kinds of images. I wonder if there's some way to get FlightCheck/PitStop to ignore screen shot images?
Thanks,
Ole
David Person
For screen shots, perhaps you should consider them "sizeless" bitmaps, conceptually. For example, a full screen shot on my left monitor is 1600x1200. It doesn't actually have a size in inches, it's just a collection of pixels.
Here is one suggestion, which will work but I doubt it is worth it to you:
1) Take a screen shot and place it in InDesign the way you want it.
2) Manually calculate the dpi of the printed screen shot. For example, in my case, if the screen shot winds up at 10" across, that would be 1600dots/10inches, or 160dpi.
3) Use phtoshop, thumbsplus, or some other application to change the dpi of the image to 160, or whatever you came up with.
This will accruately tag the image to be exactly the resolution you are actually using. Theoretically, it should work perfectly in your workflow then.
Again, that seems like a lot of work, but depending on your workflow it could be a viable solution.
Did that explanation of resolution make sense?
Ken Grace
I guess quality of a screen grab depends on what you're trying to grab.
I mainly do screen grabs for extracting halftone graphics from Word files.
Zoom the pic to the maximum depth it will take to fit across both monitors,
print screen and save as a TIFF. The resolution becomes pretty unimportant
because the scaling down to fit in a layout zaps it up to a level way above
what I need. Of course, this depends on the quality of the graphic before it
was placed in the Word doc. If it was scanned at 72 dpi, then zooming it on
the screen is going to pixellate it - you can't make up the dots between the
dots on the scan - and scaling it down is going to bring it back down to the
low res that it started at. That's when resampling can sometimes help by
assuming the stuff between the dots - but not always successfully.
But, if the task is to print an illustration of a computer screen, a
different set of rules apply. Resampling a colour halftone, when extracting
it from another document, works pretty well because there are a lot of
colours involved and it is reasonable to calculate a colour between adjacent
dots. Working from a web page or program output is probably only going to
give the graphics program 256 colours to play with and little obvious colour
progression. So a black curve on a white background could be smoothed by
adding black pixels - or by adding white. And text, which may only be a
couple of pixels thick, becomes a bit of a lottery.
I guess that's why there is no definite rule for whether resampling works in
this case. It's best to try it and compare with the unresampled image.
Sometimes it's better, sometimes its worse, and more often than not there's
no obvious difference.
Ole:
<I wonder if there's some way to get FlightCheck/PitStop to ignore screen
shot images? >
It's probably in the same box as the bits that stop preflighting telling me
that images are missing when they're there, that they are 72 dpi when they
are around 500, that fonts are missing when they've been removed from the
document, and that I've got indexed colours when I haven't. Trouble is,
nobody knows where the box is.
k
Sandee Cohen
Ian A. Wright
I've deleted your three extra copies of this Topic and moved the responses to join these. Please post only once. Thanks.
John O
ID, where the images are resized by dragging handles in or out. No
Photoshop, no extra time. We're printing to Docutech, so YMMV. But
ocassional b/w jobs to press look excellent, too.
John O