Re: Printing screen captures

[Jan Kreft]

Hi Doug,

I had similar problems with screenshots. I had to play a lot with
brightness and contrast corrections after conversion of the color
screenshots to graylevels for publication. As you say, screenshots are
great looking on your own monitor at the same resolution, but not too easy
to print in color and very bad to print in gray. I had a lot of trouble
with reviewers, copy editors, and publishers. My solution now, avoid
screenshots altogether, print numbers, read them into Matlab or whatever
and produce decent 3D vector graphics. Short term solution: use XV or
something and correct brightness, contrast, gamma, etc. and send the
printers a tiff file rather then a printout (I couldn't copy a printout
even once, and that's a good test of the problems the printers will have
in reproducing). I used gif as a format for storing as I didn't have more
than 256 colors, so no information is lost with gif. Jpeg is not a good
format for images with a few colors. Especially with gray levels, it's
impossible to resolve 256 shades of gray, so more colors is probably worse
than only a few.

You can have a look at the type of pictures I had problems with at:

http://www.eeb.yale.edu/ginger/bacillus/

I did cite the Swarm webpage in addition to the ref. Marcus has given.
No-one complained. So have a bash.

Hope that helps,

Jan.

On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, donalson wrote:

> I am preparing a paper for Ecological Modelling and have run a problem
> printing color screen shots.  I have a number of jpg color images that
> were either captured by one of the X-win utilities or by Corel Draw in
> Win 98.  They all look really great when displayed but when printed on
> my new HP880c look very washed out.  (Print priview is fine.)  The
> pictures are very similar to the Heatbug displays with 32 shades of red
> representing agent density in each cell (as opposed to heat.)  The
> printer does other jpgs quite nicely, and I have tried my pictures with
> two other editors and the result is the same (washed out.)  I take this
> to mean that it is something inherent in the jpg that doesn't translate
> well.  I am wondering if it might even be that 32 intensities of red is
> too much for a (relativily) inexpensive printer.
> 
> Has anyone out there tried to print a screen captured heatbug type
> image?  If so have you been successful and how?
> 
> As long as I am asking questions, what is the best way to reference
> SWARM when writing the paper.  No one seems to be progressive enough yet
> to accept web addresses as a reference and I don't know of the
> "consumate" published SWARM paper/reference.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
>     Doug
> 
> --
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> * Doug Donalson                 Office: (805) 893-2962
> * Ecology, Evolution,           Home:   (805) 961-4447
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> *   The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that
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