How To Make a screen shot “Shine” in Photoshop

Question

I want to add some screen shots of my product to my website. However, every image seems blurry. How do I scale them properly?

Also, are there any tutorials to make the screenshots shine? For example: Like Apple's product images, they all "shine" and are high quality.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I think you're either talking about "anti-aliasing", or you're simply talking about a resolution issue. Print is usually standard at 300 pixels per inch, and web standard is at 72 pixels. I'm not sure what you mean by your "product", if this is a screenshot of some software or if you're taking photographs and trying to put it into a printable page. Most likely, you'll need to get a higher resolution image. If you're making this image a PDF or some other print-standard quality image, the standard you should expect on high-quality prints is between 150-300 pixels per inch.

If you're adding text via photoshop, however, you can apply "anti-aliasing" in order to make the text more readable when you scale it to various sizes. Certain fonts take this better than others, and some are specifically designed not to be anti-aliased (monospaced system fonts, for example). This option is on the text tool context menu, and allows you to choose between "strong," "smooth," "crisp," or "sharp" styles.

Answer 2

First, you need to make sure you're resizing the image using a resizing algorithm such as cubic interpolation. This is usually the default on Photoshop and the like.

If it doesn't look quite as sharp as you want, you'll need to apply a slight sharpening filter to it.

As for the "shine", that is a transparent white gradient fading to nothing, and being sliced on a vertical angle about halfway across the screen.

Here's an rough example I made in Paint.NET. This is not the only way to make screenshots "shine", but this example is based off the apple.com iMacs.

Answer 3

answer is based on what i understood,might be m wrong :| it depends on how you resizing your element, maintain clarity on the basis of size is kind of tuff thing, they'll be sharper when they get exact size to show there content without stretching ,i tried to give some normal effect just to pop out the difference,mine screen shot is bit stretched :) hope this may help you a bit....!

Answer 4

You'll be needing to sharpen your thumbnail images - the standard Photoshop filter will do for adding that extra bit of crispness.

Bear in mind that none of the images in the iWorld store are real. Rather than bother to take a picture of any of their iProducts they simply get them rendered off in 3D. It is easier that way, there is no need to edit reflections of the room out of the product image or spend ages getting the lighting right.