I was working on showcasing some more of my work on my Photobucket page so I could link the album here when I realized how drastic of a change in quality there is in the new screenshots. All my newer screenshots look horrid compared to how they used to. Older screenshot: newer screenshot( taken for this post): It hurts my eyes and makes me ask "Do I really want to present this?"! Why was this change necessary? Give back BMPs please! Are there any settings I can change to make screenshots of good quality again?
You can change the format your screenshots are saved in by adding the "ScreenshotType=" line in your eqclient.ini file, which is in your EverQuest directory. To save in bmp format you would change or add the line to read "ScreenshotType=bmp". Supported formats are bmp, jpg, tga, dds and png. Screenshots will continue to save in jpg format unless this line is added. They used to be in bmp, which made huge files. That was the reason it was changed, the files were really huge.
What fanra said. Personally, I'm glad they changed the default to jpg. I don't take screenshots for artistic purposes, just for shots of particularly interesting things. Quality is less important to me than being able to post/upload it somewhere. BMP was a poor choice for this. Change the setting and you'll get your huge but high quality screenshots back.
PNG would be pretty much ideal. But EQ screws up the alpha channel, so any translucent or transparent UI elements and/or models will be messed up in the screenshots. JPG causes the artifacts from the OP's post, and can render text nearly unreadable.
Is there an option to control the jpg quality? Although I suspect it may not help much. JPG at very high quality settings will come out larger than lossless (eg PNG) without itself being lossless. Fixing PNG so it works would be the best solution IMO, but there is probably a long list of "when we get time" things already.
Thanks for all the replies. I'm not too savvy w/ this stuff but will look into this when I get the chance. My head is still in the film age, not digital. I got irritated when I learned Walgreens now sends out film to be processed and I won't get the negatives back.
It worked, thanks. At first it didn't look like it took, because I didn't close the eqclient file, therefore it didn't save the setting. Once I closed it, it worked.
Which format do you recommend? Someone was asking on the EQ Facebook page and I didn't want to misinform them.
BMP gives you a 1:1 image with no compression artifacts. The drawback is the file size. Since file size is just a HD/storage issue, if you're taking SSes to share, use BMP and compress/edit/crop from there to get a higher quality final image.
vlad, i downloaded the two pics in the first post and the first pic is a .png file, the second a .jpg. if you like the first pic and find it suitable then i'd suggest you set the screenshot to use .png files and not .bmp. .bmp files - as others have mentioned - are huge and can get upwards of many mbs in size (as opposed to the .png which is about 500kb (the .jpg being 55kb). bear in mind that to add pics to a page means that whoever opens your page is going to have to download the pics so their browser can display them. which means the bigger the file the more data they have to download to see it. if you had 5 .bmp files that means anyone visiting your page is going to be unknowingly downloading some huge amounts of data. i work in web design and can tell you i would never, ever use .bmp files to present pics unless it was absolutely necessary, and made sure anyone wanting to view the pics knew how large they were (i would hyperlink to the pic and add a file-size warning "click here for .bmp file XXmbs in size) i'm not sure what you are meaning by "presenting" these pics, but unless the people you're wanting to present them to know what size file they're in for, best to avoid .bmp altogether. i only use .bmp myself when i'm saving to my own drive for my own viewing.
also bear in mind that .bmp files aren't consistent along browser groups - meaning some browsers won't even display a .bmp though others will.
