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09 June 2010
In an earlier article, we presented three free screen capture applications for you to download and use: Skitch for MAC, MWSnap and EasyCapture for Windows PCs. To read our original article, click Screenshots – Free screen capture software. In this follow-up, I will show you how to install and make the most of MWSnap and all it’s features.
To download MWSnap, you can do so directly from Mirek Wojtowcz’s (creator of MWSnap) site: http://www.mirekw.com/winfreeware/mwsnap.html or from our “Files” section by using the “Download” link at the end of this article.
Double-click the installation icon.
Select your preferred language and click “Next”.
Click “Next”…
“Next” again…
…and “Finish”.
You can launch MWSnap by clicking “Start>All Programs>MWSnap>MWSnap 3.0”…
The MWSnap interface is fairly simple. All functions can be accessed via the menu, sidebar or toolbar.
Capturing Screen Shots:
There are 4 capture modes available. MWSnap allows you to capture shots of your full desktop, active window or menu, rectangular area or fixed size area. You can snap screen shots via the “Capture” menu, toolbar/sidebar or using the keyboard hotkeys.
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| Menu |
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| Sidebar and toolbar |
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| Keyboard Shortcuts or Hotkeys |
Capturing the full desktop or screen (Ctrl+Shift+D) is self-explanatory…it takes a picture of your entire screen and whatever may be displayed or open at the time.
Capturing an active Window or Menu (Ctrl+Shift+W) simply entails hovering your mouse over the active window or menu to snap. The active selection will be indicated by a greenish or bluish dotted border.
To capture an area (Ctrl+Shift+A), simply click and hold your left mouse button and drag a selection over the area you wish to capture.
Snapping a fixed rectangle (Ctrl+Shift+D) allows you to ensure your captured image has specific dimensions. This can be useful for keeping image sizes uniform throughout your article, document or slideshow. You can specify your desired selection area manually by entering values in the height and width boxes in the “Snap” sidebar or select a predefined size from the drop-down.
Editing Screen Shots:
MWSnap is a lightweight (<700kb) application that offers speed and quality but not a lot of features in the built in editor. At the bottom of the MWSnap window, you have access to zoom tools, copy, transform (flip horizontally or vertically/ rotate 90 degrees left or right), add a thin or thick border and the ability to insert one of 20 different standard window pointer icons.
Saving Your Image:
MWSnap supports five of the most popular image formats (JPG, PNG, TIF, GIF, BMP). As expected, you can choose different quality and bit depth for some formats.
Additional Settings:
You can configure additional settings for your MWSnap installation by clicking the “Settings” button on the toolbar or selecting “Tools>Settings” from the menu.
There are six configuration tabs. On the “General” settings tab, you can select whether to have MWSnap autostart when your computer boots up, to show the “Camera” icon in the system tray, and more simply by checking or unchecking the appropriate box.
From the “Snapping” settings tab you can configure a delay before snapping, hide the MWSnap window while snapping, auto copy or auto print.
The autosave feature is nice if you aren’t Copying and Pasting images individually into your document but rather snapping pictures of your process for import into your document at a later time. It can be activated from the “Auto-saving” settings tab. Options here include the default file format (JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG or TIF), file save location or folder, settings a default save name with auto numbering or auto date and time stamp.
As for fixed size area selections, from the “Fixed Sizes” tab, you can configure new sizes, delete ones you don’t use and change the ordering so that that the ones you use more frequently are at the top of your drop-down in the “Snap” sidebar.
I won’t get into Appearance and Sound settings – not much there to discuss.
Other Neat Tools:
MWSnap offers some additional tools. One is the virtual ruler (Ctrl+Alt+R) which is great for sizing things on your screen before taking your screen shot. For example, if I needed to know the pixel size of an image on a web page, I could launch the ruler and drag it to the image. In this example, I now know this particular image is 200 pixels wide:
Need to measure vertically? No problem! While the ruler is active, press Ctrl+V and you’re measuring vertically. Ctrl+H returns your ruler to the horizontal. Ctrl+D reverses the ruler direction (left to right or right to left). Ctrl+F4 closes the ruler when you are done with it.
Another great tool is the color picker (Ctrl+Alt+C). Trying to match a website, image or photo color? Use this tool to measure by clicking the area for which you want the color value. Click anywhere on the page, image or whatever and the color for that spot will be added to the right hand side color saver. The color saver can store up to 10 different values which is great if you are trying to match a sites color scheme.
Clicking on any color in the color saver will open this dialog which shows you the HTML, RGB, System and Delphi color codes for that color that you can copy and paste into your image editor.
Conclusion:
Hopefully, we’ve covered every important aspect of this free screen capture utility for you. If you have any questions or things you’d like to add, please leave us a comment!
Brought to you by zeke43 – www.dodisdodat.com
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