How to make screenshots smaller and still good looking

Did you ever have the feeling that if you needed a small screenshot for your website, it just doesn’t come over very well? I have experienced that myself: If you just resize a screenshot to smaller dimensions, it will look unclear and somehow ugly. So here’s a tip on how to improve the result.

In Photoshop, use ‘Filter’ – ‘Sharpen’ – ‘Unsharp Mask’, set options to ‘Amount’ 85%, ‘Radius’ 1px and ‘Treshold’ 0. This should give you some good results. No matter how it looks now, click OK and got to resize your image. Choose ‘Image’ – ‘Image size…’. Use the bicubic method. You may not see improvements over just resizing, but small text should look better now.

Now your screenshots should come up better than before. Give it a more professional look, it’s easy.

Published by

Julian Bez

Julian Bez

Julian Bez is a software engineer and former startup founder from Berlin, Germany.

  • Carte

    Nice way to sharp them. But there is a better way, which you can also use for photos.
    1. switch to ‘Lab Color’ (Image > Mode > Lab Color)
    2. select the channels and deselect the ‘a’ and ‘b’ channel
    3. go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask … and fill in:
    Amount : 90 %
    Radius: 1.0
    Threshold: 5
    (for close-up photos I prefer: 60%, 3.0, 1)
    4. switch back to RGB Color (Image > Mode > RGB Color) and you are done

  • http://w Jason

    Thanks! Worked great. Go 2006!

  • http://blog-dir.blogspot.com/ bloggers index reviewa

    thanks for the tip. do you know of a way to do that without photoshop?

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