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15 March 2010
Whether you are writing articles, tutorials, blogs, lesson handouts, books, manuals or technical documents, at some point you may want or need an easy way to capture images of your computer screen, regions, menus, active windows, web pages, buttons and more. Professional screen shots not only make your documents more attractive, they also provide readers with important visual cues to understanding your content.
A good screen capture utility can simplify your life and make you look like a pro. Windows, Linux and Mac users all have bundled screen capture functionality. For Windows users, the “Prt Scr” (Print Screen) button used in conjunction with MS Paint or a favorite Word Processor is possibly the only solution most users have ever known and used. This, however, takes a picture of your full screen and requires quite a bit of work to crop, insert callouts or arrows and transfer to your document. Windows 7 now includes the “Snipping Tool”, and while it is a welcome addition, it still lacks some functionality.
There are quite a few excellent screen capture utilities on the market which not only offer quick and flexible capture options but also image editing and sophisticated effects. If you don’t mind spending a few dollars, you’ll find FastStone Capture (~$20) or Snagit (~$50) to be well worth the money.
Free options!
Skitch for MAC:
MAC users looking for a free screen capture utility will find Skitch (Free) to be more than capable.
Windows users have quite a few good to great options for freeware screen capture utilities.
MWSnap for Windows:
MWSnap – created by Mirek Wojtowicz and available through www.mirekw.com is a very powerful utility. I’d been using this for the past 3 or 4 years and it’s served me well and at less than 700kB, it’s lightweight and fast.
Some of it’s features are (c&p from www.mirekw.com):
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5 snapping modes.
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Support for BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and GIF formats, with selected color depth and quality settings.
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System-wide hotkeys.
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Clipboard copy/paste.
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Printing.
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Auto-saving, auto-printing.
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Auto-start with Windows.
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Minimizing to system tray.
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An auto-extending list of fixed sizes, perfect for snapping images for icons and glyphs.
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A zoom tool for magnifying selected parts of the screen.
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A ruler tool for measuring screen objects lengths.
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A color picker showing screen colors with separated RGB parts.
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Fast picture viewer.
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Adding frames and mouse pointer images.
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Multilevel configurable undo and redo.
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Multilingual versions.
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Configurable user interface.
Only since I’ve started this site have I found it to be lacking
in some features – mainly in the ability to add fancy
callouts, arrows, highlights and the like. Otherwise, I would
probably still be using it exclusively.
To learn how to download, install and use MWSnap, read Screenshots – How to install and use the free screen capture software MWSnap.
EasyCapture for Windows:
EasyCapture is my new screen capture utility of choice. You can download it here: www.easy-capture.com
It does all the same great things MWSnap can do, but also offers :
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Tabbed multi-image viewer/editor.
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Capture scrolling windows and entire web pages, even if they aren’t fully displayed on your screen.
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Image effects such as blur, sharpen, brighten, and more...
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Integrated Image Effects.
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Advanced callouts, text boxes, arrows, lines and other tools.
Easy capture allows you to edit your captured shot and simply copy and paste it directly into your document. Of course, you can also save your shots to your computer and insert them later if you prefer.
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