Neopets’ #1 Screenie Guide! by braikuvdawn

Introduction

Let’s say you’re wandering around Neopia when all of a sudden Something Has Happened!, or you find a lab map piece for 1NP on the wiz, or someone says something funny on the boards. Whatever the case may be, you want to save and cherish the moment forever… but how? You can do that with something called a screenie!

What is a Screenie?

A screenie, screenshot, screencap, screen picture, whatever you want to call it, is basically just that. It’s a picture of your screen. They’re used on Neopets to capture good events like getting an avatar, funny boards, restocking, shop wiz finds, etc. If you would like to see some examples you can check out my screenies by clicking the image below.

How to Take a Screenie

The first thing you need to do is to locate the Print Screen/SysRq or Prnt Scrn button on your keyboard. It’s usually loacated in this area:

Okay. Found it? It should be in that region of the keyboard. Okay now that you have that down, let’s actually take a screenie. When you find something that you want to take a screenie of, you simply press that key. Too easy? Yeah, it is. It won’t make any special noises when you press it. No pop up window is going to alert you that you’ve copied your screen. It’s comparable to selecting some text and hitting Ctrl C. Nothing is going to happen visually except that the pointer on the mouse might disappear from the screen for an instant. Congratulations! You’ve captured your screen!

What to Do with the Screenie Once You’ve Taken It

So your screen is copied. Now you go into an editing program (I use the regular Paint program under the Start Menu and Accessories).

When that program is opened you push Ctrl V or go to Edit and Paste. Your whole screen should be pasted into there. If nothing happens then go back and push Print Screen again where you wanted to. This is what it would look like inside of your Paint screen (your image will be in there, of course):

Editing (and Saving)

Now it’s time to edit your screenie! First, you want to ‘crop’ your picture. Cropping just means cutting out the image you want from the whole screen picture. To do this, you use the tool in the upper right hand corner of the tool palette. It looks like a dashed rectangle.

Now you select what you want

and push Ctrl X or Edit/Cut.

Then push Ctrl N (File New) for a new screen (don’t save changes to untitled) and Ctrl V (Edit Paste) in the new screen to paste your selection.

NOTE: This is very important!! Make sure that when you paste your screenie into the new window to take out all of the extra space around it! You can drag the boxes on the corners of that gray area to make it as big or small as you like.

You want this:

There you can add text, wipe out a name, edit the picture, whatever you want! Oh yes. If you’re going to use text in your screenie, make sure that you use the transparent background for the text box. It’s the 2nd option underneath all of the tools. It makes the text look better on the screenie.

Here’s my version of that screenie:

Saving

Push Ctrl S (File Save) to save your work of art. I save all of my images as .png files now and it seems to work very nicely, so when the window pops up for saving instructions, put a name on your picture and on the bottom of the window it will say Save as type: I suggest the PNG. If you can’t use PNG (if you only have BMP as an option) then I suggest using a different image hosting site. The alternate site that I use is yoxio.com, but there are others such as imageshack.us, imgspot.com, and myfilestash.com.

If you want to change the file type:

You have to resave your image. First open your image into paint or whatever image editing program you choose to use. Once you’ve opened it go to File/Save As. A window should pop up that looks something like this (on Paint):

You can save it as the same file name, just change the type. I still suggest using PNG because the quality is better. Once it is saved, though, you have to reupload it to Photobucket (or wherever) and repaste the tag onto your site. It’s a hassle, I know, but it’s the only way.

Editing Tools

To go into more depth about what you can do to your screenies, I’m providing a description of the tools you can use and why you would possibly need to use them! ^_^

Okay, this is the toolbar that Paint has and what my explanations go off of.

I’m going to explain all of the main tools used for screenie making and how you use them.

Selection Tool

First of all comes that selection tool I talked about earlier.

You use it to select the part of the screenie that you want to keep. You don’t really want the extra stuff around it because first of all the file will be too big to do any good, and second of all it would take up a lot of space on your screenie page and no one wants to see a messy screenie page!

Eraser

I would only prefer to use the eraser when you have to erase text from a white background. For example, erasing names from the neoboard topics.

If I were to erase names from the actual topics on the neoboards or from neomails I would do it a different way, and I’ll show that now.

Pick Color Tool/Paint Brush Tool

This is the combination of tools that I use to erase names and such. It makes the erasing job so much neater! What you do is you click on the tool and you click on whatever color you want to use to erase with (usually the color around it). Then you click on the little paint brush

and paint over the name or whatever. Here’s my example for you:

And please, don’t use the paint brush for more than that. You probably won’t need it. If you accidentally erase something with the regular eraser, don’t worry! Just click the pick color tool and then the paint bucket tool (right beside the eraser) and fill it in!

Text Tool

This tool is one of the most frequently used tools in the art of screenie making. Please use this tool to write words on your screenies instead of the paint brush or pencil. Those are definitely a turn off. Anyway, the text tool is used a lot. Usually when you edit your screenie, the first thing you put on it is a comment. So, all you have to do is click on the tool and click and drag on your screenie how big of a text box you want. As I said before, make sure that the 2nd option underneath the toolbar is highlighted because it makes the text on the screenie look a lot better.

Here’s my example of that:

The next thing you can do is change what color you want your text to be. At the bottom of the Paint window there is a box with a bunch of colors in it. You can pick what color you want from there.

After you pick the color you can choose what font you want it to be so you can click in your text box and a menu will pop up on the screen and you can choose what font you want from there!

When you’re done with your text you can just click off of the text box. Be careful, though, because after you click off of it you can’t edit your text again unless you erase it. If you wanted to change it your best bet would be to erase what you have there and make a whole new text box.

Line Tool

You can use the line tool a couple of ways. You can underline things with it to make them stand out and you can draw arrows with it. Those are the two things that come to mind when I think of using the line tool. All you have to do to use it is click on the tool and then click and drag it to make a line. Hold the Shift key down to make a straight line. Woo! It wasn’t that hard! Here’s an example of why you would want to use the line tool for arrows instead of the paint tool:

It’s obviously much neater. You can also pick how thick you want the line. When you select the line tool, this little thing will pop up underneath all of the other regular tools. You just pick how thick you want your line.

I used two different thicknesses in the example up there.

Rectangle Tool/Oval Tool

I use these tools almost as much as I use the text tool. I’ve used the rectangle tool in the tutorial many times, including putting a box around what tool I’m talking about. As you can see, it’s very useful. You use these much like the font and line tools. You can pick what color you want and how thick the box is. You just click and drag how big you want the box or oval to be and around what. You can’t move it once you put it there, so if you mess up, just pull the Ctrl Z trick (edit undo). When you click on the tool 3 options will appear underneath all of the regular buttons.

I always use the top option because that doesn’t cover up anything. Here are examples of each:

The oval tool is the same exact way.

Uploading

Now that you have your image saved you can upload it to the internet! To do that, get an account with a free image hosting site. That means that you can take the files on your computer (mostly images) and upload them onto that site. Then you can copy the URL for them and use them on the internet! I use Photobucket and yoxio. com now. I don’t like yoxio as much, but oh well. Photobucket hasn’t given me any problems (except with bandwidth. If you exceed your bandwidth that means that too many people have looked at your images and they’re going to shut down your images for the rest of the month). So you get a free account on Photobucket (or wherever).

Then make a new subalbum and then you can upload pictures.

When you’re ready to do that, click the browse button beside the little text box.

Then you click on the image that you want.

Then you upload it!

Putting Your Image on a Site

Now that you have your image on Photobucket, you can copy the second code (the one with the less than and greater signs around it) onto a web page. To do that, you simply copy that code and paste it wherever you want it to go!

For instance if you want to put it on a pet page you go to Pet Central on the left

and then click on Pet’s Page (the icon with the Lupe)

and then edit!

If you want to create a whole new page by yourself then delete EVERYTHING in that box! That way you can paste your code into it!

Special Requested HTML

Well, I’ve had an excessive amount of neomail and boards asking me how you do some special HTML things. To answer your questions, I will put them in here!!

Buttons

Now that you have screenies you want to make a button to link back to them right? Making a button is just about the same as making a screenie, except you make the whole thing using paint (or whichever program you use). You make it, save it as PNG preferably, and upload it. All you really have to do is to link it. Here’s my example:

If you want it to link without the little blue border around it, then put border=0 right after your url in the img tag.

Page Jumps

First is the “link thing”. It’s basically when you click on a link and it takes you to a certain point on the page. Here’s my little example of what I’m talking about:

First you start out with the text (or picture, just put an image there instead of the text) that you want to link. Say you have something like what I have.

Okay so you have your text that you want to link. First you have to create a link there that will link to somewhere on the page. Don’t worry about that 2nd part yet. So creating a link you start by your regular img src tag and link it to where it will go. NOTE: DO NOT USE THE WORD “LINK” IN YOUR ACTUAL LINK!! It will delete stuff with the blocked thing. Here’s my example:

So now you have the first part finished. All you have to do is link it down to where it will go when you click on it. So in front of the text or image that you want the link to jump to you put this:

You’re done! This is what my links section looks like:

Click here to see image

Scroll Boxes

If you were wondering how I got the scroll boxes around my screenies, this section will answer your question! Here’s my example to show you!

Click here to see image

Here’s the actual text for it if you would like to copy and paste it:

<center><div style=”width:700; height:500; overflow: auto;
background-color: transparent;
border-color: black;
border-style: solid;
border-top-width: 0px;
border-right-width: 0px;
border-bottom-width: 0px;
border-left-width: 0px;”>
<center><br><font face=arial><font color=black>

TEXT/PICTURES TEXT/PICTURES

</center></div>

Text Boxes

If you look at anyone’s “link back to me” section you will see that they have a code in a little box. Many of you have asked me how to make this, so here’s the code. It’s very simple:

Here’s the actual text for it if you would like to copy and paste it:

<center><*TEXTAREA* *rows=5 cols=5>

texttexttexttext

<*/TEXTAREA*> (delete this and the *)

Tips from Other Screenie Makers

Organization is usually a key factor in how well your page looks. If your screenies are organized well they look better and people will want to read them.

BE ORGANIZED! ~raizen_jorad

To make a screenshot on mac, you need to open up the Grabber program, and choose the “caption screen” option in the menu. then the rest is the same (the copy & pasting and such). ~superwoman_12517

Use proper English, unless it’s sarcasm to make the screenie funny. ~xx_dream
Example by shippougirl5: d0nT tYp3 lYk TiS oN YeR sC33n3S!

Take it easy with the Neoboard screenies. ~superwoman_12517

Don’t use a screenie that everyone else has like the asparagus/cheat search. Keep it orginal. ~lansing420

Crop your images all the time and center them. *We don’t want to see the whole screen!* ~lansing420

NEVER use a super extra bright color. It hurts the eyes. ~shippougirl5

Make sure the font is readable with the background you chose. ~meridancer

No huge fonts. ~xx_dream

No music on the page! It drives me nuts! Or loud, animated backgrounds. ~xx_dream

NEVER TAKE SCREENIES OF PEOPLE THAT RATE YOUR SCREENIES BADLY!! ~shippougirl5

No scribbling all over the screenies! ~xx_dream

Dont only take screenies of people saying “cheese, super mega creamy cheese, ect” ~shippougirl5

The fake events can be annoying too (the ones the person made, that didnt actually happen). *I most certainly agree* ~xx_dream

Only put screenie stuff on one page. Avatar lists and stuff are annoying. Put them on separate pages. ~xx_dream

Screenies take time. Don’t try to get a million in one day because then they won’t be as good. Try to get some good ones.

PEOPLE WHO GET OTHERS TO POSE FOR SCREENIES [is bad] ~xx_dream

Pounce on every board with ze word “screenies” and try to be linked by as many people as possible. ~raizen_jorad

Take time to reply to every nm (neomail). ~raizen_jorad

Its never bad to reply to all of both good and bad comments about your screenies. Ask them why they dont like it. ~sandheep

Don’t ever think your screenies are the best. There is never a perfect screenie page. ~sandheep

Actually put comments on your screenies. It’s boring to see blank screenies. ~golfergirl580

Don’t have too many awards on your screenie page. Try to move some or all of your awards to another page. People are here to see the screenies, not lots of awards. ~meridancer

It’s always nice to have a background for your page, but don’t make it too distracting and bright. People will turn away from your screenies because the background attracts too much attention. – braikuvdawn