: Is it possible to take high quality screen captures? I'm making a manual for a web-based app. I take screenshots and put them into adobe illustrator and they lose their quality extremely fast

@Shanna688

You can enlarge the content before you take a screen shot by pressing cmd + + on Mac or ctrl + + on Windows. This is easier than seeking out a retina computer at times.

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@Shelley591

This is a common question that I like to try and push back on:


don't bother


A screen shot is literally that...what the user would see on screen. There is no need to make it any higher resolution or sharper than it is. It is what it is and that is what you should show the user.

In other words: It's fine. Just leave it! :)

That said, the lazy solution: If you can run the software or web site on a Retina MacBook, use that, as your screen shot will contain 4x the pixels by default.

If the issue, on the other hand, is that your images are getting fuzzy in software they are being imported into, the issue is potentially that the images are being converted to JPG and resampled. This is common when making PDFs. A workaround for that would be:


save screen shots as PNG files by default--not JPGs
Make sure your image import settings (or, if PDF, your image compression settings) are set to

do not resample
do not convert to JPG

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@Vandalay110

There's no way to capture a vector screenshot. You can, however, convert the screenshot to vector through use of tools like Image Trace (Illustrator, under the Window menu) or recreate the user interface by hand.

Alternatively, if you have access to a computer (or tablet) with a retina display, the screenshots taken on it will be around double the resolution and be able to be scaled up a lot cleaner. They will, however, still be raster graphics, so they won't scale infinitely.

The reason why it gets fuzzy and why you can't take a vector screenshot: Screenshots are always raster graphics. Illustrator is a vector graphics program. Raster graphics are pixel-based; they're comprised of many pixels that each have color information. When you scale a raster image up, you make the pixels bigger, which results in a pixelated or fuzzy look to the image.

Vector graphics are essentially math and some markup. When you create a shape in Illustrator, it makes a mathematical expression that represents that shape. When you scale the image, it just redraws it. It doesn't get pixelated because the shape is preserved in the expression, not in the color value of the pixels.

When you take a screenshot, you're literally capturing the pixels on your screen, so its a raster, or bitmapped, image and not a vector.

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