Capturing and Saving Screen Images

Capturing a screen image involves copying the selected window or entire screen image to the clipboard and pasting it into a graphics program, such as Adobe Photoshop, from which you can edit and save it in any image format you wish, but preferably JPEG. The following instructions are for capturing screen images from one of the computers in EB 3230 (the CPE lab) in the inner office which have Photoshop.

  1. To capture the image of the entire screen, press the Print Screen button in the top row of keys. If you only wish to capture the image of the window you are currently working in, press ALT+Print Screen instead (the ALT key and Print Screen simultaneously).

  2. Now with the image in the clipboard, open up Photoshop. Open a new image by pressing on File->New. Do NOT change the settings for the initial size of the image. Photoshop automatically sets the size of a new image to be the size of the clipboard if there is currently an image in the clipboard. When the new window has opened, select Edit->Paste (or press Ctrl+V). This will paste the screen image into the frame.

  3. If you wish, you could now crop the image, if you only wanted the final image to be a part of the entire screen or window.

  4. When the image has been cropped to the appropriate size save the image as a JPEG file. Select File->Save a Copy. Select the name and location of the final image. For image quality you may want to select the lowest quality. The image's appearance will not degrade much but the file's size will be smaller.

  5. You can now use the JPEG image on your web page or import it into another application, such as Word or Powerpoint, for use in documents and/or presentations.

Other tools available for image conversion on the DECS system include XView which is usable through Xwin32. For information on using it, contact Sergio Marti.

For an idea as to the size to quality ratio of JPEGs here are two images, one at minimum quality, one at maximum quality.(click on thumbnails for the full image)

Low quality, 112KB

High Quality, 550 KB