Taking Screen Captures with Consistency

Most of the bitmap graphics you are likely to use in your documents are screen captures.

These are some tried and true steps you should follow when creating and importing screen captures.

Screen captures best practices

1. Use a screen resolution of 800x600 at 24-bit colour.

   Set your system to default colours with a neutral background. Monochrome colour schemes look too harsh in print.

2. Take the screen capture.
3. Reduce the pixel depth of the screen captures.

   How to do this depends on whether you are printing in black and white or in colour, or if you are making online/web help.

   If you are printing in black and white, change the bitmap to grayscale mode, and reduce it to 16 levels of gray (note that this is appropriate only for dialogue boxes). If the capture has more photographic content, use 256 levels of gray.

   If you are printing in colour, change the screen capture to CYMK mode. Do not reduce the number of colours.

   If you are generating online/web help, change the screen capture to 256 colours, adaptive palette, no dithering. You can also experiment with reducing it to 16 colours, for a smaller file size.

4. Save the screen capture

   Use TIFF format with LZW compression.

5. Import the screen captures into your page layout program.

   The imported images they should all be at the same resolution to ensure a uniform look across the document. I find that 200 dots per inch is often a good choice.

   To find the best import resolution, experiment with the largest screen capture used in the document, and find the best resolution that fits the page.

6. Make note of that resolution.

   Use that resolution for all the screen captures in the entire document.