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Need advice on printing a quality screen capture

by liveformusic
8 replies
I'm experimenting with a direct mail technique which I think will be effective in attracting potential clients

Basically, I want to print out a screen capture of the clients home page,
write notes/doodles regarding SEO on the printed page itself, and mail it directly to the business owner in a "full view" 10" x 13" white manila catalog envelope (this is a variation on the more commonly used direct mail postcard technique)

I will venture a guess that this will have a VERY high open rate (hey, If you were a business owner and saw your marked up website sitting in there, wouldn't YOU open it??)

However, In my quest to get the screen capture printed as cleanly and crisply as possible, I'm looking to you warriors for advice. My experience with graphics programs is, to say the least, limited

My initial experiments with an inkjet printer and the "PrtScn" button is producing a bunch of unacceptable pixilated crap

I'm willing to invest in a laser printer and reasonably priced software
if that's what it will take. I just need direction from someone familiar with
graphics.

Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks.
#advice #capture #printing #quality #screen
  • Profile picture of the author omurchu
    Not an expert on this but I think the resolution for the web is much lower than that needed for printing therefore printing screens at an acceptable level is not possible.
    Maybe some one with more experience of this will chime in.......?

    Frank
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  • Profile picture of the author Vincenzo Oliva
    The Techsmith app-Snagit is the best screen print program I've ever seen, I love it.

    You can draw on them, add images to them, give them nice special effects like page tears, shadows, slants and distortions. A great investment.
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    • Profile picture of the author liveformusic
      Thanks, guys.

      I actually already use Techsmith's Jing Pro for video capture (which is great software).

      All things being equal, I might give Snagit a try, as Techsmith has a good reputation regarding their other products
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  • Profile picture of the author Pat Ordenes
    Regardless of the tool you use, the fact is that you are capturing a 72DPI (dot per inch) image and printing on a format that generally requires 300DPI for a crisp image, so you'll find that no matter what you do, the quality of the image will suffer.

    Since you're not printing on a huge surface, you may be ok though. Alternatively, I suggest making the print smaller, and/or do not enlarge it from the size you get from the screen grab.
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  • Profile picture of the author WAWarrior
    Consider the following apps :

    1. Grab ( if you are on MAC)
    2. Snipper ( if you are on Windows)

    Check it out
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  • Profile picture of the author bdavisx
    I use SnagIt all the time for screen captures, then modify them in the SnagIt editor and copy/paste them into Word and create PDF's from the capture. They look fine, no issues at all. One thing you will want is to use the highest resolution screen you can find.

    I've got a 1680x1050 (or 1920x1080, can't remember, mobile on the laptop right now) resolution monitor that I do the captures from, with the browser maximized. You might be able to uprez (make the resolution higher) the image if absolutely needed in a program such as Genuine Fractals, but those programs are designed to uprez images, not screen captures, so I don't know if they would work.
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    • Profile picture of the author keldog
      I agree with the above posts, quality will suffer somewhat.

      It's not an exact science but a little trick I use is to capture the image as large as possible (on a high res monitor). Paste it into your image editing software, I use Photoshop.

      Then reduce the size of the image (physical dimensions) to the printed size you are looking for, while increasing the resolution to 300dpi. (with Photoshop you need to bump up the resolution before altering the physical dimensions in the pop up window)

      What this should do is help reduce the "jaggies" in the image. It may not be great but should help the appearance. Much of this will depend on the detail of the image your are working with. May take a little experimenting.

      As a designer I might also suggest you actually reduce the image to smaller than what you are originally suggesting, ie: 10 x 13 to 5 x 6.5 or something like that. Leave some space around the border where you can add your notes/doodles and use arrows and lines with circles to the areas on the image you are drawing attention to. This will make it easier for the client to read (more likely they will read it I would think).

      Maybe even use an image of a computer monitor and paste the image of their website into that. I think that would really drive the point home they are looking at a (their) website.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jay Moreno
    i would highly recommend using screengrab for firefox...

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...on/screengrab/

    it will take the a screenshot of the whole web page not just whats showing in the current display- save it off as png - convert it to a smartobject in photoshop - it wont look too bad when you drag it in your fullsize template and scale it up in size
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