Screenshots?

Screenshots or captures are a great way to show people how something looks like on your screen. Windows already provides a build-in way to capture your screen(s).

If you press the “Print Scrn” button on your keyboard (it’s usually right above the “Insert” key) Windows will capture your current screen and store it in the clipboard. Usually you paste it into MsPaint or directly into your favorite office application.

To capture the current active window of e.g. your webbrowser you just have to press ALT+Print Scrn and Windows will copy the image of the active window into the clipboard. So far so good.

If you have to work with screenshots on a daily basis you won’t be very happy with the Windows solution. For example I need to make screenshots of applications to prove to the developers that there’s a certain bug in their fancy new program. I started to look around for a tool which is easy and fast to handle, preferably free, lets me draw some circles or rectangles on the captured image and allows me to save the captures directly into files without the need to start mspaint.exe.

Greenshot – Tiny, incredibly powerful screen capture tool

So I stumbled upon the free, open source tool called “Greenshot”. It features an own image editor which lets you to instantly edit the screenshot you’ve just made.

If you start up Greenshot and hit the “Print Scrn” button on your keyboard your cursor will turn into a crosshair which lets you to specify the region on your monitor to be captured.

After you have done that your screen will flash and the build-in image editor opens up where you can make further changes to your capture like crop it, write text, draw rectangles, circles or arrows and even obfuscate the parts you don’t want the recipients of your screenshot to be able to read.

And still, you’re able to capture single windows, or your complete screen(s). BTW, you can even capture the output of your video player which displays the picture in overlay mode!

Click on the Greenshot logo to get it or read more on what it can do for you!