[chimerax-users] Image saving/exporting options

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Matthew,
There is no option in distance units like inches/centimers but you can specify a high resolution by specifying a high number of pixels.  E.g. if you want the image to be 2 inches wide at 600 dpi then you need the image to be 1200 pixels wide. The file would not be marked with the 2 inches width, but you could set that in some separate image-editing application.

There is no option to save PDF of the graphics window.  It will not really save you in file size anyway when the contents include an image like a photo or molecular graphics. The PDF will be just as big as the resolution of the image requires.  

The filesize/resolution tradeoff is different for different image formats, and there are various types of compression available, and some formats are "lossless" and others are not.  I'm not an expert on the details. I use TIFF and PNG when I want lossless (and those are the ones journals usually want), JPG if I'm willing to lower the quality.

I hope this helps,
Elaine
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Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco


> On Feb 13, 2023, at 8:15 PM, Matthew Graneri via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users at cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi there,
> I was wondering if there was an option to set the resolution of an image you want to export? In the older Chimera application, there were many more options open to you when you wanted to save an image (I’ve attached a screenshot of the old and new image saving screens for comparison). If not, is there any chance of implementing a resolution specification option sometime in the future?
> 
> I was also wondering if it was possible to save images from ChimeraX as PDF files? I find that they usually maintain a high resolution without being particularly big, in terms of memory.
> 
> Apart from that, really enjoying ChimeraX!
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Matthew