How do people take nice screenshots?

[Mr. Picklesworth]

I didn't realize this was rocket science until I needed to take hundreds of them. Really, all of the screenshots I am taking come out ugly somehow. Originally it was because I had enabled subpixel smoothing for fonts, which really falls apart if the images must be scaled at all. Disabled that but now something else must be wrong because it is still unshakeably ugly, particularly in the realm of fonts!

Any tips on taking good, high quality screenshots?

[chucky chuckaluck]

what are you using to take screenshots with, and can you post a thumbnalied example of what you're talking about?

[Mr. Picklesworth]

Oh, sure! I'm just using the Take Screenshot utility in GNOME.

Examples attached...

They look okay initially, but as soon as they get dumped in a program like Inkscape or manipulated in any significant way they get very ugly.

With the last attachment (Assistive Technologies picture) I think I may have suddenly got my font settings right for it, but I still look forward to any tips people have :)

And to answer the inevitable obvious questions:
No, I did not mess with them when I cropped the things in GIMP (payed close attention to the numbers and they were weird beforehand!), and my fonts actually look quite attractive in motion.

[chucky chuckaluck]

i see what you mean about the fonts looking bad, and even the 'preferences' icon in the third screenshot looks a little pixely. frankly, the fonts look like the default setting of a fresh ubuntu installation. what are your settings for them? (you could always change them temporarily just for screenshots.)

i never liked the gnome or kde screen capture programs. for me, they always looked blurry. i used to use the screen capture in gimp until i started using scrot. i'd say try scrot. one thing i llove about scrot is that i can put it on a timer on one workspace and then shift to another workspace if i don't want anything showing up in the panel (it takes a shot of the workspace i'm in, not the on it's in).