Simple Tip: How to Take a Screenshot
Screenshots are just images of what is displaying on your monitor. These images can be very helpful for capturing error messages or other things on your computer you’d like to record. No special screenshot taking programs are required despite what many will try to convince you of. It’s a function built into Windows.
There are two ways to take a screenshot. One will take a picture and include everything you can see on the monitor the other will take a picture of only the active window (the top most window that you have actively selected/you’ve clicked on most recently).
Here is a screenshot of my desktop to better explain the Active Window:
The entire image was taken by pressing the Print Screen button and then pasted into Paint.NET and saved. This is my entire desktop.
The Notepad with the red border is the active window. You can tell because the title bar (top of the window) is blue. If you pressed Alt+Print Screen, you would get a screenshot of just this window and it would look like this:
Back to the first image, the Notepad window with the green border is an inactive window. Until you click on it or minimize/close the current active window, it will continue to be the inactive window and there is no way to get a screenshot of just this window without selecting it first.
1. Get whatever you want to take a picture of viewable on the screen.
2. Press the Prt Scr button to take a picture of the entire screen or hold Alt and press Prt Scr to take the active window.
3. This will take the image and put it on your Clipboard (where things go temporarily whenever you copy/paste or cut/paste). Note: If you copy/paste anything or take another screenshot, it will overwrite the image that you just took with no way to retrieve the original image. Vice versa is true as well. If you cut/paste something to move it and then take a screenshot, the cut/paste object will be overwritten.
4. Open an image editing program like Paint. Then go to Edit, Paste.
5. Save your image or modify it as needed.
Paint or any other image program will work. I highly recommend Paint.NET. It’s free and more comparable to Photoshop than anything else.
If you want a graphics program that specializes in taking screenshots, I recommend: Hardcopy.
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November 13th, 2009 at 12:58 PM
Hey Jason,
I haven’t had a reason to try paint.net yet (old school PS die hard that I am
), and it’s been quite some time since I tried GIMP. Howe would you say GIMP and Paint.net stack up against each other?
November 13th, 2009 at 1:59 PM
Howdy Robert,
I am a big fan of Paint.NET. I was also a fan of Photoshop right up until I found Paint.NET. PS CS2 was what I was using last. Paint.NET feels like the right balance between MS Paint (simple, do the basics only, but fast to load) and Photoshop (complex, do anything, but takes a long time to load). I know this is comparing Paint.NET to Photoshop when you asked for a Paint.NET and GIMP comparison, but I say this to describe the sentiment I ascertained from Photoshop. Back in the day, it felt like you would have Photoshop to do all of your editing and another program to do all of your viewing. PS would just take too long to load and open if you just wanted to view and confirm if an image was the one you wanted. I think the same held true for any quick edits. If Paint had some features you needed (like the ability to crop), you wouldn’t have to wait the few minutes it took to load up Photoshop. That’s basically what Paint.NET. Paint with a lot of the Photoshop features that loads quickly and has some innovative features of its own.
GIMP, while I haven’t used in a while seemed to be more comparable to Photoshop with the loading time and a last minute hack of an interface to get it to work on Windows was far too clunky. Screenshots of the current version look better, but for something used to make beautiful images, the old version’s interface sure looked awfully ugly and added its own learning curve onto it. A solution to this might come in the form of GIMPshop, a GIMP hack to change the interface to be more Photoshop-like.
Feature for feature, Paint.NET and GIMP are probably pretty close in line as powerful image editors. Paint.NET takes the cake in my opinion though, just because of it’s intuitive and slick interface while still having extendability through their plug-ins. I think Paint.NET could still be useful to complement a Photoshop user because of its fast loading as a viewer and quick editor.
It’s been a while since I’ve been working on longer projects inside of Photoshop or GIMP. Do your opinions sync up with my take or have things changed recently?
November 18th, 2009 at 1:05 PM
Yeah, my own reaction the first time I opened up Gimp (after being a long time PS user, from as far back as PS 6, maybe even 5.x) was "ack, this ain’t pretty." But beyond that, once I moved around a bit in the menus/options, I found it did most of what PS did (minus some neat filters, the occasional neat new feature, etc, where PS always seemed a year or two ahead of GIMP). Of course, with CS3 (maybe 4) and the undockable palettes, it suddenly became possible to make the PS interface look a lot like the default GIMP layout
I’m with you on the speed issue. PS has far, far to much overhead for me to use it to just quickly look at an image. And I’d say the same for GIMP (again, caveat, it’;s been years since I’ve tried GIMP). But, I generally do still fire it up if I decide I need to do some image editing. Have you had a chance to try the online free version of Photoshop? I sounded potentially promising for the user new to image editing (like Photoshop elements, but online and free!).
Each new version of PS seem to pack in more features, more overhead, and more bugs than the last, instead of making a more responsive program. But, I’m sure the PS adherents out there will just tell me, as usual "you just need a real man’s computer to run this." And I have been there, with the newest, fastest processor (desktop, that is, I’m not a Xeon guy really), fastest RAM (at twice whatever the current recommended amount was), fastest hard drive, $400+ video card, and newest version of PS on at least two occasions, and _still_ was unimpressed with how fast it loads, and how much it seems to drag on my system when running (even without any open documents). Add to that the disaster that I’ve found that ridiculous file management program they added a few cycles back (I forget what it is, I turned it off almost immediately and did my best to blot its existence from my mind) to also be a huge, slow resource hog that didn’t facilitate my work flow, at least, at all) and you can color me generally unimpressed with the changes to PS. Well, okay, some of the features are neat. Healing Brush was a useful addition, and I know that the some off the deep down, under the hood new options thrill actual graphic designers, but as a web developer and _moderately_ capable PS user, I would definitely not recommend PS (or GIMP) to the novice who just needs to edit a few images or screenshots. From what I can tell, GIMP <-> PS comparison basically come down to the same thing as Wintel <-> Mactel comparisons- you’ll feel most at home with the OS/Software you started learning on, but a novice introduced to either is likely to experience about the same learning curve to achieve competence with it.
November 18th, 2009 at 2:50 PM
Color me unimpressed. Photoshop Express
Photoshop Express, in my opinion, was about the same as using MS Paint with an added upload/download delay (and red-eye correction). Not worth it when you could install Paint.NET for Free as a much more powerful alternative. The best feature Photoshop Express has to tout is that it’s free and not ridiculously expensive like the full version of Photoshop. There are many tools that have, for the same price tag, the same offering or better.
November 24th, 2009 at 8:53 PM
An interesting, timely article on GIMP being dropped from Ubuntu.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news … mpaign=rss
F-Spot photo manager selected to be the successor as a more mainstream photo tool.