Monthly Archives: August 2009

In our last lesson, we talked about what file format to work with and why, as well as some other general items of interest.

Today, we’re going to talk about cropping and screen aspect ratios.

If you have an older style monitor, you want to stick with the default of 4:3.

Somewhere around 2004-2005, monitor makers realized that widescreen would give a larger number in inches, while giving a smaller number of pixels (so they can charge more for less).

Generally speaking, these are in a ratio of 16:9 or 16:10.

To figure this out, take your screen’s resolution and divide it out.  For example, my monitor is 1920×1200.  1920/16 = 120.  120 x 10 = 1200, so my monitor is 16:10, and that is what I should be using.

Aspect ratio is hidden in Config –> Misc 2.

Lets look at the effect this has.

16:10 (correct for my screen)

16:9 (close, but not quite right)

4:3 (default)

Hang on, lets take a closer look at the 4:3.

That is an overly fat taru.  Especially considering it should look like this:

Aspect ratio does make a big difference.

The second lesson for today is to crop your screenshots.

There is no excuse.  The GIMP is free and available for every platform, and Paint.NET is free and an excellent light weight photo editor for Windows.  No excuses at all.

For the most part, I don’t care about your chat log or your health bar.  I don’t care about the menu, your TP, the top bar, or the meter that shows up when you are in battle.  This doesn’t include the windower stuff that I mentioned already that I don’t care about.

So please, crop and resize your images (in that order).

The final tip for today is to check your color settings.

Far too often I’ve seen what looks like it must be a monitor out of calibration, that gets compensated for via the video card’s control panel.  What this does is creates an image that is very dark or very light to others, but looks normal to you.

If your video card puts out a dark image, and your monitor is set to display too bright, it looks fine to you, bur dark to everyone else.  And the reverse is true.

Your best bet is really to double check with a factory-installed version of Windows.  These are generally fairly close to good.

When in doubt, reset your video card control panel to default, then adjust your monitor accordingly.  (I am guilty of this sometimes too)

However, this isn’t always bad.  So be careful of ruining something that would be good.

Generally speaking (and this is the photographer in me) a slightly darker image is better than one that is slightly lighter.  There is a reason that many photographers will underexpose their images by 1/3rd-1/2 stops.  It is also easier to recover from an image that is a little too dark than one that has lost detail due to being too light.  Slightly darker looks fine.  In fact, it often produces a more comfortable image (or if you’d prefer, a warmer image).

Part 3 coming at some point shortly.  I’ll finally talk about content.  If it goes long, I’ll make a part 4.

Hello class, today we will talk about how to take better screenshots for posting on your blog.

Now, I come at this as a photographer, so in theory, I know a little bit about taking pictures.

The first thing to understand is this – different file types are designed for different things.

It is true, not all image types are intended, or best, for all types of images.

For starters, the .GIF is terrible for photos.  It is.  Thankfully, no one really uses them for photos anymore.  What they are good for is line-art, comics, and yes, screenshots from video games.  .GIF usually has really good results for game screenshots.

JPG is good for only photos.  That is what is was created for.  It sucks for in-game pictures.  Stop using it already.

BMP is an uncompressed format.  It takes a lossless image (depending on bit depth), but uses a lot of disk space.  It also cannot be displayed natively in a web browser.

PNG is a compromise format.  It handles both photos and line-art, but uses more space than either.  A photo saved in jpeg will be smaller than a photo saved to PNG, but will have the same image quality.  If you want proof, go see this link http://forums.ffxiclopedia.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20490&start=15#p260848 .  I posted a photo I made saved with different settings in photoshop as a jpeg as well as a png (the reason I am not reposting them here will be mentioned later).  The PNG is more than double the size of the JPG, but equally represents the image I was trying to recreate.

However, for in-game screenshots, PNG is the easiest to work with.  Since most blogs and forums do not get significant enough traffic, it will provide the best results.  In other words, stop using JPG for screenshots.

That’s the first lesson.

The second is very simple – stop showing all of your Windower data on your images.  That’s great, you can see all of the tp of your alliance and about how long until your buffs wear.  Joy.  IF you haven’t already, change this line in your init.txt

bind sysrq screenshot [file type]

to

bind sysrq screenshot png hide

Yeah, I’m saying to use PNG.  Do it.

The third lesson is a bit more subtle.  Resize your image.

That’s wonderful, you play at 1900×1200.  I do too.  If you post an image, I don’t need something huge.

If you pay attention, I generally resize everything to 500px wide max.  It fits this theme well.  Other themes may be more forgiving.  My old theme would look good with a 600px wide image.  Learn your theme, and resize nicely.  If you really need to post a full-sized (or larger than 600px wide image), display a small version and link it to a bigger one.