Sunday, August 9, 2009

Screencap Quality and You

So you want to save some screenshots, but they look like a bunny ended up in the business end of a wood chipper. In the immortal words of Parker Lewis, Not a problem.

Simply use the following /cmnds and you'll have an aesthetically pleasing configuration of images that humans will go NUTS for.

/console
screenshotFormat tga
/console screenshotQuality 10

If perchance you aren't into the whole, looking hot thing, you can use these:

/console screenshotFormat jpg
/console screenshotQuality 3

Format denotes the type of file your image will be saved as. tga is bigger and prettier but jpg is smaller and more compressed. The quality ranges from 1-10 with 10 bieng Jessica Alba and 1 being Seth Rogen.

Once you have selected your image quality and type, then you are on your way from misery to happiness today. If you selected jpg, you are ready to view rudimentary images in all their unsplended glory, but ready for instant upload to be shared with the whole world via blurry and inconclusive picturesqueness. (Yes, that's a word. No, you can't look it up.)

However, if you selected the oversized, bloated and lumbering sexiness that is tga, then you'll need some sort of convertor/viewer to actually SEE what ever it is you thought you saw. I suggest
irfanview and recommend saving them as PNG. Sure, you have to do a few extra steps, but isn't it preferable to those jaded edges that make it look like you have some form of stage 7 diabetus exploding from your tree bark, scarring away the small woodland creatures that came to visit you during your glorified screen capture session? Yes, I think it is.

For the love of Elune, don't use Photoshop to convert your images. What are you, masochists?



2 comments:

  1. I'm lazy - I just hit print screen and then paste directly into a new Photoshop document.

    I shudder to think how many pictures are in my screenshots folder :/

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  2. Sadly, there aren't going to be that many.

    You see, Blizzard saves the screenshots in the same folder, but they have a limited number. Once that number is reached, the new screenshots begin to save OVER the existing ones.

    I have a separate folder for screenshots and once a week or so I pull them from the default and put them in another folder, so I don't lose my screenshots.

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