[millmoss]

So my background is creating eLearning in native Flash. One of the "challenges" I've had with rapid eLearning tools is learning that to take advantage of the rapid part, you have to suffer on the quality side. Having said that, I'm happy to share my basic graphic experience.

Snagit is just fine for single screen capturing. It's important to remember that ANYTIME you resize an image (either shrink or grow), you are going to affect the quality of that image. What you want to do, is pick a screen resolution and design for that. If you pick 800 x 600, then you should capture your screenshots at that. If you are at 1024 x 768, then capture at that size. If you have a large screen that requires scrolling at either resolution, then consider showing in in halves, with an animation to simulate scrolling, or making a demo in Captivate.

The Articulate option of forcing optimal size helps at least prevent users from resizing (and therefore blurring) imagines post publish.

Another way of "resizing" without actually resizing is to remove the white space. For instance, if I have a screen shot that is 800 x 600, but the 200 pixels on the right are whitespace, I will use photoshop to select the right border, and then nudge it over to the right, and then crop. I'm fairly sure you can do this in Snagit as well. This works well with some graphics, not so much for others.

PNG should be the graphic format. Articulate supports it, and in terms of graphic formats, it has everything you need.... alpha transparency, great ditherless quality, and decent file size bang for the buck. When I design in Flash, all I use is png.

And I always save to an external file and then insert via ppt. I do this for a couple of reasons. First, i've never trusted the quality of a pasted in image (I have no hard data to back this up, it's just a gut thing). Second, having all of your screen shots listed by page in an images folder is just good organization. Mind you, I don't organize my desk as nicelym and my desktop is covered with icons, but I do save out all of my screenshots.

And Captivate. Keep in mind that Captivate has a compression scheme and Articulate has a compression scheme. Maybe one of the MVPs can weigh in on double compression, or whether Articulate respects the compression of the Flash file and doesn't compress further at publish. If Articulate is compressing regardless, then you want to come out of Captivate at a high quality.

Having said all this, I still haven't found a way to get completely crisp screen shots out of Articulate or even ppt for that matter. Everything seems to have a slight blur, even when I follow my own rules. It's not really a compression blur, because it's there when I just do a View Slide Show in ppt. But the above will help immensely in reducing the amount of blurring.

Hope some of this helps.