Use of PTE for A Tutorial

[TonyFalla]

I am trying to produce some Photoshop Tutorials using PTE but have hit a bit of a quandary on screen resolution. I have 2 PC's available a laptop with a 1024 x 768 screen resolution and a desktop with a 1920 x 1200 monitor. What I have been doing is using Photoshop in full screen mode and then using "Screen Copy" to create my JPG files for use in PTE, also in Full Screen mode. What I have found is that if I use the desktop at 1920 x 1200 when I run the resultant PTE on the laptop the the wording on menus etc has lost clarity and is unreadable, I presume that pixels have been discarded to reduce the resolution. If I run photoshop in 1024 x 768 mode and create my JPG's this size, the resultant PTE is fine on the laptop and but is now blurry when I run it on the desktop, I presume because extra pixels have been added.

I wondered if anybody else had done something like this and what they found as the best compromise resoltuion?

Tony Falla

[Barry Beckham]

You could do your screen grabs from the same resolution you will use for your PTE tutorial, probably 1024*768. Or if you are using a higher res monitor you can always reduce the window size of Photoshop to do your screen grabs smaller than the resolution you will use and then crop off what you don't need around the edge.

That way the grab will be within the resolution you intend to use, but...................

PTE will always try to expand your images to fit the monitor they are being played on, so it's not the best medium for what you want to do. To make sure it doesn't expland the images you will need to disable the scaling of the main images in the projects options > Screen tab. Then you should be OK.

[davegee]

Tony,

It might be an advantage to use 1024x768 and "original" mode for the screen grabs in place of the default "fit to screen".

That way they would be OK on the laptop and be readable (albeit smaller) on the larger monitor. I presume that you will do the 1024x768 screen grabs on the laptop?

I have more or less the same setup as you: 1920x1200, 1200x800 and 1280x1024 monitors.

To complicate matters further, when connecting to my TV via HDMI, the required resolution is 1366x768.

DaveG

[fh1805]

Tony,

You could also try setting the Project Options...Screen to give you "Windowed mode", setting your window size via the two input fields and (optionally) turning off the window border.

If you set the window to 1024x768 the slides would fill the screen on the laptop and appear in the middle of the 1920x1200 monitor. They will also playback correctly throughan XGA digital projector (1024x768).

regards,

Peter

[TonyFalla]

Thanks for the advice I have now tried both Original mode and Windowed Mode and both give the results I wanted so I now know how to proceed.

My copy of Photoshop is a single licence and so rather than keep activating and deactivating I change my desktop display settings to 1024 x 768 while I do the screen dumps and then revert back to 1920 x 1200 to produce my final images and PTE.

Thanks again for the advice

Tony Falla