>From doing many screen prints for documentation, let me offer one piece of
>advice...
Reduce the screen resolution and bit-depth (number of colors) the the absolute
minimum required for your screen shot.
I once was given a document that was only 4 pages long, but took up 47MB of
drive space. It consisted of two paragraphs of text and a few screen shots.
Not only did it take up a LOT of space, but most people couldn't open it...it
was just too darn big!
The main culprit in large filesize screen shots (or any photograph in general)
is the color depth. Every one byte (8-bit) increase in color depth will
increase the filesize of an uncompressed picture by 2. HxV resolution also
plays a major role and it's closely tied to the bit-depth. Here are some
uncompressed calcs...
640x480x8-bit (256 colors) = 2.5MB
640x480-16-bit (64K colors) = 5MB
640x480x24-bit (16M colors) = 10MB
800x600x8-bit (256 colors) = 3.8MB
If you send a screen print via e-mail, it's best to use a common "compressed"
format, such as .JPG. However, don't go overboard on the compression as he
resulting image will become pixelated (equiv to "grainy"). I generally use a
75% quality setting for low res pics, and 50 to 60% for high res pics (or even
30%). Proper use of picture compression can yield excellent results. I have
made 50K .JPG's that look much better many 200K+ files you'll find on the 'net
. For printing, a TIFF is preferred, but filesizes are large.
Alright, I've digressed enough. 73 and happy screen printing!
- Aaron Hsu, KD6DAE
[athsu]@unistudios.com
[kd6dae]@arrl.net
No-QRO Int'l #1,000,006
. -..- - .-. .- " .... . .- ...- -.-- "
p.s. The best utility I use to change display resolutions on the fly is the
"ResMan" util. It's available as a Win95A "PowerToy" and is standard wth Win95
OSR2 and Win98. It runs in the System Tray and allows changing resolutions and
bit-depth on the fly. Some video drivers also have a similar function.
> ----------
> From: Barry Kutner[SMTP:w2up@mindspring.com]
>
> I Copied the screen and pasted it into Word, and its 3 Meg!
> First, please don't post any graphics liek this to the reflector - post
> it to a Web space and give us the URL. Second, please tell me the
> best way to do this so it's not such a huge file.
> Tnx/Barry
>
>
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