Screen shot image quality - do you have a view?

[doofdaddy]

Kelly Pavlik...the new undisputed Middleweight champion from Youngstown.

[MoxziDotCom]

Originally Posted by jessica

I might just be an odd one out then...I much prefer to do my authoring in captivate rather than powerpoint. I find it to be more flexible, especially with audio and interactivity. Either way, you can have success.

I am a web designer getting yanked into making screenshots for the CEO (without powerpoint or Presenter experience) .

Now, I totally get the whole issue of bitmap'd screenshot being turned into .swf and therefore losing quality. I have enough FLASH get how Presenter works.

I'm trying the Make The Image Into A .SWF Method (then import into PPT...then Presenter it)... with Captivate3.

I figured out how to use Captivate and 'PrtScrn' to take screenshots, but when I tried to Publish as .SWF I got one big .SWF of my screenshots with 3-seconds between them.

Then I tried Publish as .swf at one shot / slide / project at a time, stripping out the audio, and player parts.... and all I wind up with in the .swf is the Captivate preloader anim, and then a BLANK screen.

Before I found this thread, I was resurrecting another (Post #6) with the possibility of using Flash CS3 somehow, but the only response so far, was another vote for SnagIt. And after looking at SnagIt 9's HELP, my head wants to explode (and not just because I have Colbert Report on).

[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.

[millmoss]

And while I'm on the subject... how about PNG support in the logo panel? I was amazed that it wasn't listed as a choice, and it would allow us to use one transparent logo and yet have the option to change the color of the side panel with no worries.

[GerryWaz]

Excellent posts and suggestion. Have you filled out a enhancement request on the "Presenter Panel PNG" (say that three times real fast - ) for Articulate's consideration?

http://www.articulate.com/support/contact/feature/

[millmoss]

I haven't. Between my emails to support, posts here about issues, and other feature requests, I don't want them to start regretting they sold me the software.

[millmoss]

AHA is what I want to say. But I'm not sure it's entirely appropriate.

So in thinking about all this compression stuff, I thought that there might be some compression going on in ppt that we would want to disable in order to get the best screen shot output. If there are any ppt gurus out there that can chime in on this, I would really appreciate it.

As far as versions go, I have 2003 on my work computer. The compression options there are unfortunately giving me the runaround (literally).

If I select a picture and click Format Picture, then go to the Picture tab, I have a sneaky little button there called "Compress."

If I click that button, I get a dialog which gives me three sets of choices (defaults noted):

The first set is "Apply To" and has the following radio buttons"

( • ) Selected Pictures
( ) All pictures in Document

The second set is "Change Resolution", and it has three radio buttons:

( ) Web Screen (which changes the res to 96 dpi)
( • ) Print (which changes it to 200 dpi)
( ) No Change

The third set is "Options" and has the following Checkboxes:

[√] Compress Pictures
[√] Delete cropped area of pictures

Now, when I found this I was like "YES!" And then I tried to change the values. It seems to me, if we want the best screen shots, we should set the following settings in presentations that exist already:

Apply To

( ) Selected Pictures
( • ) All pictures in Document

Change Resolution

( ) Web Screen (which changes the res to 96 dpi)
( ) Print (which changes it to 200 dpi)
( • ) No Change

Options

[ ] Compress Pictures
[√] Delete cropped area of pictures

(I unchecked Compress Pictures which was checked by default)

Now I have two buttons: Ok and Cancel. I click OK.

I get a dialog box that says "Compressing Pictures may reduce the quality of your images. Do you want to apply picture Optimization?"

Now I have two choices: Apply and Cancel. Apply what? Picture Optimization or the changes I just made to get rid of compression? Cancel sends me right back to my dialog. And Apply does something, and then my setting are exactly the sames as default if I go back in.

Any clues out there? I found these two blog entries, but so far none have helped.

How to disable image compression in Power Point 2007

The PowerPoint® Blog - PPT 2007 Compresses Images By DeFault

J

[Spectre]

Hi millmoss. From my experience in PPT 2003, using the compression options (or not) has no impact on the output in Articulate. Keep in mind that anything above 96 dpi can't be seen on PC monitors anyway. This differs from the JPEG compression that is performed through Articulate.

I still believe that the bluriness we experience with published images--regardless of image format we use--is due to some quirks in the Powerpoint export engine. That is why inserted SWFs usually look better than inserted bitmaps...because the export engine is not being leveraged. But that's just a theory

Regarding Captivate and the double compression question you asked earlier, it doesn't happen. When you insert any SWF into Articulate, a copy of the file is created. In other words, the file is not modified in any way.

HTH,
Phil