InDesign Settings When Placing Image Screen Cap from SnagIt

Question

I've already tried obtaining assistance from the SnagIt people, but they feel it's an InDesign setting I'm missing, which is likely since my skill with InDesign is very beginner level.  Thank you kindly for any assistance.
I produce training materials for software and need to take screen captures that will then be inserted into InDesign. I do the production myself and then give to a printer.
I cannot, for the life of me, get the images to look half decent in InDesign. I save at 96 dpi, 300 dpi, tif RGB, tif CMYK, PNG etc. and to be honest, the captures look worse once they hit InDesign than if I took a basic windows screen cap.
The screen caps should be presented at a reasonable, readable size in InDesign as they are for instruction purposes. Professionally printed computer manuals is the quality I'm looking for.
SPECS:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2400 MHz) -- THIS IS A QUAD CORE
Memory: 4095 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit  (Build 7600) -- ULTIMATE VERSION
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 8800 GTX/PCI/SSE2 -- 2 SLI'd
Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0011.9562
I know I'm doing something wrong. The saved images look fine on my screen (I use ACDSee to view). But the moment I put them in InDesign, they look horrid (blurry, jaggy).
If you can't help me, do you know of someone who can?
I tried on the SnagIt forums, and no helpful responses.
Thank you kindly.
Sincerely,
Alexandria

Answer 1

You don’t say what’s wrong with the screen captures, but since you list several different resolutions I can guess. You are resampling and Photoshop is trying to produce smooth results, assuming the image is a photograph and that aliased (pixelated) details are undesirable.
Screen captures look best when they are not resampled. Save them in a lossless format like PNG or TIF and place them unmodified. If you edit them and add any layers or text (Layers panel shows anything but a single Background layer), then save as PSD or Photoshop PDF. Some print shops might either flag those low-res files as problems, or try to “help” you by upsampling them. You can avoid these issues by resampling in Photoshop using Nearest Neighbor interpolation. Use full 100% increments, ie: not from 72 ppi to 300 ppi (416.67%) but 72 to 288 ppi (400%).
Other tricks to explore are changing the antialiasing method of your display. Sub-pixel antialiasing is often used for LCD displays, but when enlarged and printed (look at the noise around “Font Family”) can be ugly. On a Mac you can turn this off in the Appearance Preference Pane.
Black can be a nuisance with screen captures. Your screen captures are probably saved in RGB. When they are printed the RGB values are converted to CMYK by the print shop. Normally, this is not something to be concerned with. But Black in RGB (0,0,0) is usually treated as a rich black or photographic black, and is converted to a colour with lots of each CMYK ink in it. For the fine type, dialogues, and lines of a screen grab, that is undesireable.
I have my own way of dealing with this, and I know others who have similar, but not identical, workflows. All require Photoshop. If you want further help with this, please ask either here or in the Photoshop forum.