Screenshots are digital pictures that you take of your computer screen. You don’t need a digital camera or any special equipment to do so. You can use special software, but it’s not required. Earlier, I introduced screenshots and some of their uses. Now, I want to give a quick guide to capturing screenshots and then later today introduce some of the more popular screenshot capture utilities.
Capturing screenshots without any special software
Both Microsoft Windows 2000 & XP, as well as Mac OS X can capture screen images.
Microsoft Windows
The Print Screen key (sometimes Prnt Scrn) will capture the entire screen, including the taskbar. Older versions of Windows required the use of the Ctrl key, but don’t any more.
Use Alt-Print Screen to capture just the active window. The active window is the current window that is open. The size of the captured window depends on the size of the active window. For example, if the active window is full screen, then the screenshot will be a full screen capture.
Screenshots are placed on the Windows clipboard. You can paste the pictures into a word processing document or into the picture editing program, Microsoft Paint. Paint comes with Windows operating systems and has some basic editing features. Paint is usually found through the start menu, under the programs and then accessories menus. If you can’t find it there, you can run the program by clicking the start menu and selecting the run option (see below). Type “mspaint” without quotes in the text box and click OK.
Mac OS X
Similar to Windows, there are a couple of ways to capture a screenshot in Mac OS X.
Use shift-apple key-3 to capture the full screen.
Shift-apple key-4 captures only part of the screen. Once you press these three keys, your cursor becomes a small cross, and you can select the region of the screen you want to capture. Pressing the space bar turns the cursor into a camera, allowing you to capture windows, menus, menu bars, and so on. As you pass your mouse over the item to be captured, it will be highlighted.
The default for captured images in Mac OS X is to place screenshots on the desktop in the PICT format. You can capture images to the clipboard by simply pressing the ctrl key while taking the screenshot. You can then paste the picture into your favorite photo editing/creation software.
Powerful screenshot software
If you require more options for your screenshots, you may want to check out some of the more popular screenshot software on the market. I’ll give a brief introduction to a few of them in my next blog.