Snipping tool screenshots blurry when used in other media / cleaner alternatives?

Hi Dave,
Use the PrintScreen key to capture the whole monitor (all monitors in a multi-monitor config) or Alt+PrintScreen to capture just the the active/focus window to the clipboard. Then do a paste (Ctrl+v) into whatever image editing program you prefer, such as GIMP, IrfanView, paint.net, etc. Crop the image to whatever part of it you want and save it in a no-compression/lossless file format, such as PNG. Here's an example of that method using IrfanView:


Regards, Joe

Use Snagit from Techsmith. It's far superior.

I've heard of it Jamie - does it address the blurriness and degradation in text and graphics from say -Instagram?

User ShareX. Nothing compares and it is opensource
https://getsharex.com

@"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
choco install sharex 

Select allOpen in new window

This probably is not an issue with your snipping tool but rather with how you're using it. An image is going to be blurry in Office documents depending on the original size and what size you're actually using it. Using a different tool is unlikely to make a difference here, although the different tools mentioned are generally more feature-filled than the snipping tool (I personally use Snagit).

For example, let's say you use the snipping tool (or ANY screenshot tool) to take a 200x200 snapshot of the screen, and then you past it into a Word document and you scale the image in Word to be 4x4 inches. Since there is only 200x200 pixels of data, Word (or any Office document) will try to "fill in" the empty spots by scaling it up. This results in blurriness because it is guessing at which pixels to add in order to fill in the space.

Similarly, if you take a huge, high-resolution 20000x20000 image and scale it down to 4x4 inches, it's going to have some artifacts/blurriness because it has to figure out how to put all those pixels into a small space.

Or if you zoom in or out while looking at the document / slide, it has to adjust the display pixels accordingly, which can also result in blurriness.

So ultimately, blurriness depends on how you're viewing the document, and what the original resolution is compared to the display/output resolution (the dpi). If you get a good original resolution and don't scale it too much (e.g. if you're dealing with just regular screenshots, try anywhere from 72 to 150 dpi), the quality of the image should be pretty sharp.

Finally, if you just paste directly into an Office document, you'll sometimes end up with compression artifacts, so to get the clearest image, save the snip/screenshot to a separate PNG file (not JPG unless it's a really high-quality JPG), and then use the Insert / Image functionality to insert the image into the document from the saved file. This way, it will use the quality of the file as it was saved instead of trying to compress the image during a paste.

I've never had any problems with Snagit but I believe there is a free trial you can download and try. The pixel-level zoom precision mode for capturing an area of your screen is also very good, and it can capture screen recordings as video.

Hi Dave,
If you want to go the route of a program rather than the PrintScreen or Alt+PrintScreen key (followed by cropping in an imaging app), there are many out there. Some folks in this thread have already mentioned Snagit, which is TechSmith's high-end (paid) product, but TechSmith also has a free product called Jing:
https://www.techsmith.com/jing-tool.html

It doesn't have all the functionality of Snagit, but it's good — and it's free.

An excellent, free, open source product is Greenshot, published at SourceForge:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/greenshot/

Here is its own website:
https://getgreenshot.org/

You can create screenshots of a selected region, a window, or screen. You can annotate, highlight, and redact screenshots.

Under the covers, I suspect that all these tools are calling the Windows API to capture the screen, so the blurriness from the Snipping Tool is due to other factors, such as saving as a lossy JPG and/or embedding it elsewhere...the post by gr8gonzo is spot-on...he nailed it! Regards, Joe

SnagIt is the gold standard, but paid (worth every penny though).

ShareX is a great alternative and is free.


As with any tool though there are limits to what you can do.  You can't expect to take a small capture and then blow it up and retain the image quality.  Also, when saving the screen captures, the image format selected can greatly impact the image quality, so it goes far beyond just the screen capture itself.

Windows 10 have a built-in tool. Give it a go :)
Win+Shift+s

Also see https://screenpresso.com/
They also have a free tool which also captures videos! 😁
Plus no installation needed, you can just run it!

Hi Dave,
Where do things stand on this? Do you need more help with it? Regards, Joe

I'm fairly certain my comment is the correct answer here. At the very least, it would be correct in many situations for the given question.

I have to agree with gr8gonzo, there are multiple answers that provide plenty of information on what is most probably going on here.

I also agree that there are good solutions here, including my first two posts, and several posts from other folks. Regards, Joe