Do you print screen shots?

KimGeling

KimGeling

Member
I'm hoping someone with experience can answer this question for me. I like to use screen shots from Facebook and Instagram for my PL layouts but I've never printed my pages as yet. Do you use screen shots from your phone and your computer in your layouts and if so do they need to be resized to get a better resolution? I saw a Cathy Zielske video about this but her process confused me. I don't want to send off books for printing and have them come back as a pixelated mess.
 
It depends on how big you have the photos on your page. IMO there is no benefit to doing a screenshot over just dragging the photo directly into your program. Standard print quality is 300px / inch, but you can still get decent quality at 150 px/ in. You just have to look at the dimensions of your image to figure out the math. If you have to enlarge it, you're going to lose quality. Photoshop does some resampling where the program guesses how to fill in the pixels during enlargement, but it's not perfect. I would recommend printing something at home to see if you can live with the quality. I never increase an image more than 20%.

I hope that helps!
 
I've taken the odd screen shot of my phone to capture a funny text thread or something like that, and an occasional screen shot on my computer. I only do it if i want it to tell the story and I don't have any other photos. I keep them small though, so the pixelation is minimal. I wouldn't recommend it if you're trying to get nice large photos.
 
I have tons of screenshots from texts in my PL from last year... my husband was away at school for a year & came home every other weekend. I included those screenshots to show the things we said, but also because texting was a huge part of that season of our life, when it normally is much less so.
Also did a few screenshots of my fitbit or running app maps, instagram, my phone home screen, mobile boarding passes, etc.
All I did was screenshot them on my phone (5-6 year old iphone 5c! Ha!), my phone syncs to Google Photos, I selected & downloaded them from Google photos & then just dragged them to the 3x4 spaces in my template, didn't resize other than using the bounding box to get it "right".
And they all look fine!! (printed 12x12 through Blurb)
I will try to take a pic & add here.
 
Thank you ladies! Rebecca, those are exactly the sorts of things I screenshot... with young adult kids it is hard to get snippets of their lives without resorting to texts, instagram posts etc. I would usually only use them in a 3x4 space so hopefully they will be ok.
 
I've taken screen shots of text messages and used them in 3x4 slots in my Project Life. I print them 12x12 and they look just fine.
 
KimGeling said:
Thank you ladies! Rebecca, those are exactly the sorts of things I screenshot... with young adult kids it is hard to get snippets of their lives without resorting to texts, instagram posts etc. I would usually only use them in a 3x4 space so hopefully they will be ok.
Click to expand...
Screenshots of texts, etc are much easier to enlarge because the images tend to be less complex (less color variation). I've successfully printed them just fine. If the quality looks good relative to everything else on your page it will print just fine :)
 
A lot of times my daughter forgets to send me pictures of my grandbabies, so I've actually used screenshots taken on my phone on LOs.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk
 
Yes - I add a lot of screen captures in my layouts... just printed 8x8 from persnickety prints... looks fine.
 
I also use screenshot from time to time when it's important to include, but I know that the resolution of the screenshot is not like that of a photo taken (by phone) so I don't want to risk on just dragging it on my layout, what I do is to put it on top of a 3x4 white bg and resize it because I am printing on a 12x12 and I worry about the outcome.
 
KimGeling said:
Thank you ladies! Rebecca, those are exactly the sorts of things I screenshot... with young adult kids it is hard to get snippets of their lives without resorting to texts, instagram posts etc. I would usually only use them in a 3x4 space so hopefully they will be ok.
Click to expand...
I do a lot of screenshots as 3x4's, too. They look fine. But the device you're using plays a role, too. My phone screen is a higher number of pixels than my computer screen, so my phone's screen shots are also more pixels and can be used larger than my computer's.

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk
 
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