One thing you can do to smooth the edges on your screenies is turning your FS Resolution to a higher resolution than the default 800x600x16. Then once you have changed it you can go into a resizing program (Irfanview is a GREAT utility) and resize the pic back to 800x600. Here is some steps with pics on how to do this:

1. First you must change the resolution to the highest resolution.  Mine is 1280x1024x32. To do this you go to Settings\Display\Hardware\


2. Load up your flight and take a screenshot (if you're using Irfanview, you hit Ctrl+F11 and you might want to take 4 or 5 shots to get a shot with everything in it)

3. Once you have your screenie, go to Irfanview and open it up using File\Open then go to Image\Resize/Resample and a screen willl pop up.      



Click 800x600 and then Ok.

4. Now go to File\Save and a little box will appear next to the save menu



In the box at the top is a slider. At default it is set to 75. Move that slider around for the best compression (obviously 100 is best and 1 is worst). The higher the number on the bar the higher the file size. Remember when compressing pics that a picture on SimV can only be 100k max and a post 500k max. This means If you have five pics, and they're all under 100k you're fine, but if you have more you need to compress them lower so that they all together do not exceed 500k.

Now you have a finished picture ready to post on SimV.

Cheers,
Andrew

P.S. Hmmm, might could be a sticky because I know when Omag did that compression tutorial, I hated looking all through the pages trying to find it. Just an idea

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Oh no it ain't 


Tip: If you're setting up a screenshot, use the highest screen resolution available.  Who cares about the frame rate if you're only taking still shots anyway?  Set up a good hi-res shot, take your images, then change the settings back to something flyable if your computer is stuttering.

Gryshnak

Nice but I have an LCD monitor and 1024*768 is the max resolution,  any recommendation?

I have a widescreen with a 16:9 aspect ratio. However, reducing the screenshots while maintain the ratio causes my shots to be 800x500. That's well below the minimum requirement for the screenshot competition.

Yes I know what you tried to say but what I mean is that if my max res. is 1024.768 so:

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my shots will never have great quality???

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1280x1024x32 isn't a standard resolution / aspect ratio for what it's worth. When you change the aspect ratio you get an amount of distortion.

To resize a pic to 800x600, the aspect ratio of the original screenshot should be the same, ie. 1280x960  

It's not possible to resize to a different aspect ratio without distortion, you either keep the original aspect ratio or you crop to get the required pixel size. Mmmm, cropping... mmm.

Because of the LCD / widescreen debacle, we had to change the screenshot forum rules to allow for different aspect ratios. Just be aware that any conversion of the same pic into a different aspect ratio will create distortion of the original pic.

CRT monitor users must not "Force" higher resolutions than their monitors support, this will definitely KILL or damage some CRT monitors, particularly older or poorer quality CRT screens. There is a check mark in windows display settings that you can set to prevent displaying resolutions that the monitor isn't qualified to support, providing windows recognises your CRT monitor.

I don't ever care about jaggies...heck, do you see any jaggies in this pic?



And no, my rig is not a super or anything...it's only a medium end PC that just about gets the job done...