Guild Wars 2

So I have no idea why but my Screenshots come out as PNG. therefore with horrible resolution. I have a Mac, anyone knows how to make them JPEG again?

PNG is a lossless file format, so I’m not sure why you think that’s the reason for the horrible resolution. JPG is lossy, and makes smaller files than PNG due to that. Besides that tidbit, I’ve got no idea why it’s saving that way. Maybe it’s a Mac Client thing, idk.

ETA: I would actually be interested in the opposite question. How do I get my JPG files to save as PNG instead?

kimeekat.2548:

PNG is a lossless file format, so I’m not sure why you think that’s the reason for the horrible resolution. JPG is lossy, and makes smaller files than PNG due to that. Besides that tidbit, I’ve got no idea why it’s saving that way. Maybe it’s a Mac Client thing, idk.

Well even when I use Best Appearance the screenshot looks horrible.

PNGs are actually very good resolution pics. It’s not the file format. I use them everyday.

TChalla.7146:

PNGs are actually very good resolution pics. It’s not the file format. I use them everyday.

So how do I make my computer take better screenshots, if you zoom in just once the picture is crap

You need a better computer. I would recommend a normal PC. Keep your Mac for stuff like video editing.

PNG screenshots is a Mac thing.

For Windows, you can save bmp screenshots by adding -bmp to the shortcut.

Healix.5819:

PNG screenshots is a Mac thing.

For Windows, you can save bmp screenshots by adding -bmp to the shortcut.

Thank you, Healix, you are my hero for today! And lo the internet said: Let there be lossless.

Hey geo, Something else you might try is using the native mac screenshots.
Press cmd+shift+3 to make a screenshot of the whole screen. The picture is placed on your desktop.

PS: some other nice tricks;
cmd+shift+4 you can make a selection of the screen to capture (but this is not for in-game)
and adding ctrl to both combinations puts the screenshots to the clipboard (when you need a figure to paste in a document for example)

Edit: since the format from this method also gives PNG (which is definitely better than JPG) you might also consider the following. When previewing the screenshot it might give some strange effects when it is resized to the window of preview (if you use this) when you zoom in a bit it shows the original pixel/inch ratio resulting in the high deff picture. Same should be achieved if you view your pictures at full screen.

mac saves screenshots as png (probably because of the reasons people said above)
if you want a jpg instead, open the png in preview, then ‘Save As…’ to jpg

As to why the quality isn’t that great: you need higher resolution and/or graphics settings. check the graphics options in GW2 to see if they can be increased (it’s limited by your computer). If they can’t, the only way you can get higher quality screen shots is with a better computer.
‘better computer’ may not necessarily mean a whole new computer. upgrading the graphics card and/or a higher resolution monitor would likely work well enough (on ultra-high graphics settings, you would likely get very low fps around 5-10, but since you only want good still screen shots, that’s ok).

The reason why you can’t zoom in without everything looking like crap is because the screenshots are already taken at a small resolution (that of your screen or lower). If you’re zooming in, you’re trying to look at details that aren’t there. Changing the file format isn’t going to change that.
There used to be an option to take screenshots at higher resolution than what the game is running in, but that was removed before launch.

btw: your mac is able to zoom in on the screen in real time. No new pixels are created (it’ll still look blurry), but it can be done. I believe the default is control-mouse wheel. So hold down control and mouse wheel up to zoom in and mouse wheel down to zoom out. If it’s not on by default, then you can turn it on in the System Preferences / Mouse & Keyboard / Mouse.
Actually… I’m not sure if it’ll work while in GW2…