Why your captured screenshot is blurry

This is part of the answers hub. A blurry capture is rarely the capture tool's fault — it's almost always resolution being lost somewhere between the screen and the saved file. Here are the three places that happens.

1. Browser zoom below 100%

If the page is zoomed out, the browser renders fewer pixels and the capture inherits that lower detail. Text that looked fine on screen captures soft.

Fix: press Ctrl/Cmd + 0 to reset zoom to 100%, then capture. For dense UI you can zoom in before capturing to get more pixels per element.

2. A small crop scaled up

Cropping keeps only the pixels inside the rectangle. If you then view or embed that crop at a larger size, each source pixel gets stretched. That's the pixelated look. Cropping from a shrunk preview rather than the full-resolution frame makes it worse, because the preview already threw pixels away.

Fix: capture at full resolution and crop from the original frame. A good capture tool keeps the full-res image and applies your crop to that, not to the on-screen preview.

3. The wrong file format

Saving a screenshot as JPEG introduces compression artifacts (faint blocky halos around text and sharp edges) because JPEG is tuned for photographs, not UI. PNG is lossless and keeps text crisp. The full tradeoff is in the image-format reference.

Fix: save screenshots as PNG.

A sharp capture your agent can still read

Sharpness matters for humans. But if you're handing the image to a coding agent, legibility plus format both matter. A crisp PNG that the agent can't ingest is still a dead end. See why your agent can't read your screenshot.

Frequently asked questions

Should I use PNG or JPEG for a screenshot?

PNG. Screenshots are mostly flat color, sharp text, and UI edges, exactly what PNG's lossless compression keeps crisp. JPEG is built for photographs and introduces blocky artifacts around text. See the image-format reference for the full comparison.

Why does text look fuzzy even at full size?

Usually browser zoom. If the page is zoomed below 100%, the captured pixels are already downscaled before capture. Reset zoom to 100% (Ctrl/Cmd+0) and recapture.

I cropped a small area and it looks pixelated. Why?

Cropping selects fewer pixels; if those are then displayed large, each pixel is stretched. Capture at full resolution first and crop from the original frame rather than from a shrunk preview, so the crop keeps the source pixels.