Steam screenshots

daninthemix · 5 Mar 2011 at 12:41

I just took my first batch of screenshots with Steam, but the quality is nowhere near as good as the original.

By which I mean, I'm playing Far Cry 2 and I screenshot an amazing scene. The resulting screenshot seems lacking in terms of colour, contrast etc.

Anything I can do to improve this?

Alex74 · 5 Mar 2011 at 12:42

printscreen? Should take screenies in far cry itself..

AHarvey · 5 Mar 2011 at 12:43

what are you using to view the screenshot?

I can edit a photo in photoshop and it can look great, windows image viewer looks different.

Not sure if Steam allows the changing of settings for screenshots though.

Albino Eatpod · 5 Mar 2011 at 12:44

Are you sure you're viewing them at 100% size? If you're viewing them in Windows Photo Viewer, you'll see them slightly squashed and the quality won't be there. Alternatively, Steam could be using aggressive JPEG settings - can this be changed?

daninthemix · 5 Mar 2011 at 12:55

On close inspection I think its because Steam is using fairly high JPEG compression. 1920x1200 images are coming out at around 300k, whereas if I make my own JPEG at 100% quality, the files are well over 1MB.

yashiro · 13 Oct 2011 at 00:56

Not wanting to necro here but is there anyway to decrease the compression used by steam screenshots? It's not exposed in the UI but is there a hidden config file/option to change the default?

gazzab · 13 Oct 2011 at 01:45

What the hell is that about Windows Image Viewer? It turns everything orange and nasty. It used to be that I'd switch to Windows Live Photo Gallery (or whatever it is) and they'd turn up there looking normal... since the last update or 2 that's turned orange as well

The guy who suggested standard print screen, that generally returns nothing but a black screen with full-screen apps.

yashiro · 13 Oct 2011 at 02:53

The Windows Image Viewer issue is to do with your colour management settings.
Play with them to fix it. Setting stuff to sRGB usually works.