Screen capture loses colors

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lheckman
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Location: Chicago, Illinois

Screen capture loses colors

Unread post by lheckman »

I'm having trouble capturing screen shots that accurately represent the colors on my screen. Let's say I have a dialog box with a light blue border and a little red button with a white "x" in the upper righthand corner. I set up the screen to display the dialog box and I click the "Screen Capture" button in either Impict or H&M. (It doesn't matter whether I take a shot of the whole screen, free region, or fixed region.)

When I see the application again, with the orange screen capture box drawn around my selected area, the color in the dialog box is all washed out. The border is white, not light blue, and the "x" is white on a white background (the "x" is outlined in black so you can still see it).

I have not changed any of the options and there don't seem to be any options that would give you any control over this anyway. As far as I can tell, this only happens with dialog boxes. Is this a bug? or something I'm doing wrong?

Thanks for your help.
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Tim Green
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Re: Screen capture loses colors

Unread post by Tim Green »

When you make a capture you will see a Save dialog before the image is inserted in the editor. Look in the lower area of this dialog and you will see options for the color depth and possibly also grayscale. You have probably accidentally set these options to a small number of colors or black and white or grayscale. 8)
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lheckman
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Re: Screen capture loses colors

Unread post by lheckman »

The color is lost before I get to the Save step. It happens when I go back to the application window, ready to hit Ctrl/Click to take the screenshot. (This is hard to describe; if you could look over my shoulder, you'd immediately see what I mean :-)

I don't think this matters, but the Save options show 256 colors and "greyscale" is not selected.
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Tim Green
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Re: Screen capture loses colors

Unread post by Tim Green »

This isn't a known issue at all. I'll check with our developers but I've never heard of it. I suspect you are having a problem with your graphics card driver or something like that.
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Alexander Halser
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Re: Screen capture loses colors

Unread post by Alexander Halser »

What OS do you use and what color depth are you running on your display? I wonder if a 3rd party program intefers with dialog boxes, because the screen capture makes no difference between modal and non-modal windows.

Between "free region" and the other two capture modes is a huge difference, that you could check: the window or fixed region capture create a transparent window with a red frame. That window size is changed on the fly as you move it over the screen to match the size of the window under the mouse. That might require a repaint of the underlying window and I wonder if your graphics driver is too slow to do it quickly enough. The "free region" capture, on the contrary, puts an overlay image over the entire screen, then lets you select the desired region. It must not show this effect - in the free region the colors could either be distorted or not, but it doesn't change during the capture.

Since the colors are ok in the resulting screenshot, it must be something between Windows and the display. The screen capture takes a bitmap rectangle from the Windows screen canvas, where the colors are obviously correctly mapped, despite they appear incorrect at the display.
Alexander Halser
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lheckman
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Location: Chicago, Illinois

Re: Screen capture loses colors

Unread post by lheckman »

I am using Windows 7. Color depth is 32-bit.

I know I am not explaining this well. The resulting screen shot is NOT ok. When I set up the screen capture and go back to my application window, the colors are washed out as though the dialog box has lost focus. Clicking on the dialog box does not help. If I position the mouse right on the red X button, the red will come back (but it's a bit tricky to do that and that doesn't restore the blue borders, they are still washed out).

All three capture modes have the same result. I can send you an example---would you prefer I upload it here or send it to you privately?
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Tim Green
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Re: Screen capture loses colors

Unread post by Tim Green »

I doubt whether sending us a sample capture would help here. My guess is that you have some kind of hardware problem on your computer, or a buggy graphics card driver or something like that. If you try it on another computer you will find that it works normally. There is really nothing in the capture routine that can normally change the color resolution of the computer screen... :?
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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