Which export settings to use

The four formats

The short version. Editing it later, or it has to be exact: PNG. Sharing it: WebP. Somewhere that might not read WebP: JPEG. Long, printed, or filed: PDF.

PDF is the one that is not simply another image container. PageShotter can write the words it read from the page into the PDF underneath the picture, so the file is searchable and its links still work — which is why a long capture is often better off as a PDF than as an enormous PNG nobody can open. Follow the screenshot to PDF guide or learn how to save a webpage as PDF.

Capture and edit before export

Start with a full-page screenshot or scrolling screenshot. Use the screenshot editor to crop, add text, arrows and shapes, highlight details or blur an area before image or PDF export.

Quality

Quality applies to JPEG and WebP only, because PNG is lossless — it stores every pixel exactly, and there is no dial to turn. Lowering quality keeps the image at its full size and describes each pixel less precisely.

What it damages first is text. Lossy compression works by discarding detail the eye is least likely to miss, and it assumes photographs: gradual tone, soft edges, noise. A screenshot is the opposite — flat colour with hard black-on-white edges — so the first thing to go is the crisp boundary of a letterform. Below about 80 you start to see it: a faint halo around body text, thin rules going mushy.

90 is the default because it is the point where a screenshot is still clean and the file is already a fraction of the PNG. Going to 100 buys very little and costs a lot of bytes. Going below 70 on a page full of text is usually a mistake.

Scale

Scale makes the image smaller in both directions. Every pixel that survives is as sharp as it was; there are simply fewer of them. It applies to PNG, JPEG and WebP, and it is a downscale only — the list stops at 100%, because enlarging a screenshot invents detail it never had.

Scale is linear, area is not. This is the thing people get wrong. 50% halves the width and halves the height, so the result holds a quarter of the pixels. 25% holds a sixteenth. That is why the export menu shows the fraction of the pixels rather than only the percentage you picked.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• A high-resolution screen gives you 50% for free. On a retina display the browser captures two image pixels for every pixel the page laid out. Exporting at 50% gives you exactly the size the page was designed at, with nothing lost that you could ever have seen.
• Below 50%, how the shrinking is done matters. Reducing an image in one step reads only a fraction of the original pixels and throws the rest away, which does not soften a screenshot so much as break it — characters drop out and hairline rules disappear. PageShotter reduces in repeated halvings instead, so every original pixel contributes to the result. A 25% export should look evenly soft, never shredded.

Copy is deliberately exempt from Scale. A size chosen for a download should not silently shrink what you paste somewhere else, so the clipboard always gets the captured size.

Quality or Scale?

Both shrink the file. They are not interchangeable, because they spend different things:

The rule of thumb. If the screenshot will be read, protect the text: keep quality at 85–90 and reach for Scale instead. A page at 50% and quality 90 is almost always more legible than the same page at 100% and quality 55, at roughly the same file size — because the first one throws away pixels you were not going to read anyway, and the second one damages the ones you were.

If the screenshot will be zoomed into — a diagram, a chart, small print you need to check — do the opposite: hold Scale at 100%, because pixels you have discarded cannot be zoomed back in, and lower quality a little if the file must shrink.

Use both when a capture is genuinely enormous. Scale to 50% and hold quality at 85 on WebP, and a very long page becomes something you can actually attach to an email.

Situations

Common questions