Guild Wars 2

Ever Since the 19th of May patch, the quality of screenshots taken has reduced by more than 50%. My filesizes went down from 400-500kb to 100-200kb and JPEG compression artifacts are everywhere. Please revert the old compression setting. I am familiar with the -bmp command line argument, but I feel that I should not need to save screenshots in bitmap to have them in decent quality.

Same problem, the screenshot quality seem to have been lowered significantly from before. Agreed with the -bmp command line, since the previous compression settings were giving out good quality screenshots after all.

pre update quality settings:
JPEG, quality: 94, subsampling ON (2×2)

post update quality settings:
JPEG, quality: 75, subsampling ON (2×2)

This info was taken straight from the screenshots, as you can see, the screenshot quality has been reduced to an unnecessarily low level even for posting on websites this is quite low.

Why Anet had to mess with the quality settings is beyond me, it does absolutely nothing to the game.

Very odd indeed, especially with the beta tomorrow/today. With so many people taking screenshots to post around the web, the beta is sure to be associated with low quality and grainy textures.

ArenaNet, perhaps it would be in your best interest to prioritize reverting this nonsensical change in quality before the beta begins to avoid the flood of low quality beta images being posted across social media and many, many gaming websites. I feel you need all the positive responses you can get regarding the expansion and forcing low quality screenshots just before the beta takes place does not seem to be a sound decision.

This was reported earlier such as in this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/May-19th-Screenshot-Quality

However I wasn’t sure if it had received any attention yet. I just wanted to report that the issue is still present. Prior to the aforementioned patch update .jpg screenshots were in the 400Kb-700Kb range, and now they are in the 200Kb range. The quality of the new .jpg screenshots is pretty poor with some very visible artifacts.

Using the -bmp command line parameter is an option to retain quality, but unless you like 5Mb screenshots, you then need to manually use a conversion program later to convert them to .jpg.

Could we please restore the .jpg compression algorithm to the pre-May patch version? Those screenshots had a good balance of size and quality. The new ones are sacrificing quality too much.

I’m trying out using the -bmp command line parameter to get the high quality shots and then using an external image editor to re-save them as .jpg with not so aggressive a compression ratio. The results are good, however that extra step is annoying to have to do now.

To those able to enact a change, please consider reverting the .jpg screen shot quality back to the way it was before.

The jpeg screenshots have always looked horrible, doesnt matter that they got knocked further down. The -bmp option is easy to set and only takes a few seconds.

TheHeretic.3529:

The jpeg screenshots have always looked horrible, doesnt matter that they got knocked further down. The -bmp option is easy to set and only takes a few seconds.

I’d need to respectfully disagree. Prior to the recent change, the .jpg quality wasn’t bad. Maybe it wasn’t as nice as a lossless .bmp, however the compression algorithm was set to a much better balance. After the recent change though the balance is now too far in favor of compression at the expense of quality.