University
of South Alabama Online Learning Lab
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| How To Create A Screen Shot |
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Objective: This job aid will teach you how to create
a screenshot of any web page or capture any screen event. Step
by step instructions are given for Adobe Photoshop, but you
can also use this tutorial with Corel PhotoPaint or Paint Shop
Pro or even Microsoft Paint.
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STEP 1
Open the web
page in the web browser. On Windows, press the Print Screen
or Prnt Scrn key on your keyboard, found at the upper right
of the keyboard. This key will capture the entire screen. If
your monitor resolution is set to 640x480, that's the size of
the screen capture. If your monitor resolution is set to 600x800,
that will be the size of the screen capture, etc.
To capture
only the active window, press "Alt + Print Screeen".
on the Mac,
press "Command + Shift + 3".
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STEP 2
Open up your paint program - you can use virutually any paint
program, including Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Corel PhotoPaint,
or ven Microsoft's Paint, usually installed on Windows in the
"Star-> Progrmas-> Accessories-> Paint".
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STEP 3
In the paint
program, select File/New, then Edit/Paste.
Pretty simple,
right? ... Your screen capture is now ready to be cropped or
scaled.
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Troubleshooting
Screen Captures
The trouble with screen captures comes when you need to scale
them for print or the web. Because your screen resolution is
so small, any resizing usually obliterates the type within the
screen capture. To minimize the changes to your screen capture,
try these tips:
- If you scale (resize) the
screen capture, make sure that you resize proportionately.
Problems occur when you rescale more in one direction than
another, ending up with something like a wacky hall-of-mirrors
effect.
- If you need to print the screen
capture, try changing the dots per inch size rather than resizing
the image. For instance, if your screen capture is 640x480
at 72 dpi, and you need it to fit on a letter sized page,
change the dpi to 100 or 150 instead of reducing the pixel
size.
- Resizing a screenshot to display
on a web page? Since you'll need to reduce the actual pixel
size it's just going to get fuzzy. You can minimize this problem
by showing only part of a large screen capture as shown below:
- How do they get such nice
looking text on screen captures in magazine ads? Simple, they
fake it. In your paint program, erase the text, but leave
the rest of the web page layout. Open the screen capture in
a drawing program like Adobe Illustrator, or Corel Draw, or
Quark, or Pagemaker, etc. Then recreate the text in your drawing
or page layout program.
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Some Useful
Utilities
The little print screen trick above works fine for a few screen
caps, but to create a lot of screen captures you'll want to
use a handy utility like those listed below. You may already
have a screen capture utility available to you: Corel Draw includes
a utility called Capture which captures both still screens and
onscreen animation, and PaintShop Pro also includes the ability
to do screen captures. One last point - you will definitely
need a screen capture utility to take screen captures inside
Photoshop.
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