Forum Discussion
Storyline low screenshot quality
Hello,
The rule of thumb with zooming in on images is to capture them at a higher resolution and then they will stand up to zooming in on them. An image that is at a lower resolution will quickly deteriorate in quality once it starts being blown up past its original size. (Vector graphics being the exception, which a screen capture would not be vector.)
You may try looking at the settings of your screen capture software and set the resolution and screen size (raster) higher. For example, if your Storyline project is 1280 x 720 pixels and you need to zoom in on a website screenshot and display it on part of your Storyline slide, try to capture the website image at a higher size (such as 1920 x 1080 or higher) and see if you can set the resolution to a higher rate (such as 300 pixels).
Again, capturing higher than you need will allow you to blow up an image and retain quality. Capturing at the same size or lower and then blowing up an image will decrease quality.
The general advice is to get your image at the highest resolution that you can, because it's a reductive process after that point. Your original file is the best in terms of quality that you're ever going to have. Audio works the same way. You can only take away details, never add them.
Always consider the end first; what will it need to look like on your audience's screens? Let's say that they're running 1920x1080, same as you. If that's the case, then you don't need to worry about adjusting for them. This also means that you don't need to get a monitor for the sake of getting better quality images (you almost never need to do that nowadays, anyway).
The easier you can make it on yourself, the better. If your monitors are set (in Windows, I assume) to 100%, then you're seeing the image at full resolution, not manipulated by the OS. Doing this is a best practice when using SL.
When you import an image in SL, it'll be resized to fit the resolution of your story files. That means that your image captured at 1920x1080 will be reduced to fit. If you then have to zoom in on the converted image, you're zooming in on a smaller resolution file, and so it'll lose details again.
So the general advice is keep your OS zoom at 100%, capture your images at the highest resolution you can, and avoid zooming in on images that have text in them. Hope this helps.
so my conclusion is that my boss and teammates have higher resolution monitors than I have, and that when they view what I'm capturing in snagit of a browser based GUI, they see more blurry text, than perhaps what I see on my lower resolution monitor which was used for the capture. I've heard them both complain about the images that their businesses provide being lower quality, but we don't know what hardware our audience is using to view our eLearning.
here's what it looks like at 300dpi, 100%, monitor 1920x1080, image not resized, scaled to fit by SL slide 1280x720 Image Quality test