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> Cropping screenshots, on the other hand, can save you from having to
> resize them. My standard approach is to crop the screen capture to
> show the particular area or object that I'm writing about at the
> moment at 100% size.
Michael West wrote:
> you can make these look
> quite neat and clean by "fading" the edges to white.
> This tells the viewer that they are zoomed in on a
> small segment of something bigger.
>
> I use the spray gun and eraser tools in PaintShop to do
> this, but I'm sure there are other means as well.
Indeed. In Photoshop, I fade cropped edges by applying a
transparent-to-white gradient. It's easy and it gets the point across.
The perils of using screen captures become evident when the deliverables are
in PDF. Screen captures look horrible at the wrong resolution, and it
doesn't take much for a GUI to be too big for the page at the "correct"
resolution. Sometimes for the sake of look-and-feel an entire GUI window
must be inserted without cropping, but when it comes to specific features,
go ahead and crop.
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