Gordon Lightfoot Forums - Making screenshots

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Making screenshots

Please indulge me for a few minutes. This screed is basically thinking aloud of some thoughts on a new screen capture discovery that I would like to share with you and will become notes for a planned tutorial on making screenshots
First of all why make screenshots?
Take a look at a tutorial I wrote yesterday to help a friend who had trouble finding a file on her computer, so I tried to introduce the principle of using wildcards,so when I did not think she really grasped what I was trying to get her to do to find her missing file
I wrote the folowing tutorial:-
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/Tutorials/search_wildcards.htm
you will see that to try to clarify the text I included 8 screenshots.

Making screenshots is one of the most common operations I do on my computer, I make them constantly for many purposes including:-

saving details of an online payment or registration on a website

saving instant messaging conversations

saving on screen graphics if there is no direct way of saving an image
(sometimes an image is protected to try to prevent you copying
it. but nobody can prevent you making a screenshot of it!)

making still pictures from videos playing in a media player such as Quicktime or Windows Media Player

recording details of program etc menus as used in the tutorial above

the list is endless.
I have therefore over the years found and used a variety of screen capture programs
Many people will say wait a minute there is a "PrintScreen" button on my keyboard, so why get a program at all?
PrintScreen certainly allows you to capture everything that you can see on your monitor and places an image of the complete screen on the clipboard from where you can easily paste it into program such as Microsoft Paint and save from that program
or any other program such as Microsoft Word or Wordpad
But you get the whole screen so if you only want a small portion then you would then have to crop it
far easier is to use a screen capture program where you can select an area to capture
I initially used a freeware program called
screenhunter
but at some point it stopped working ,
I then moved onto
Gadwin Printscreen
which you initiate by simply pressing a hotkey, I usually set it to use F6
everyday I check the current offering on http://www.giveawayoftheday.com
and back in 2007 I downloaded a more advanced program called

TNT Screen Capture
and late in 2008 another called Capture It
I was drawn to both of those by an extra feature which allowed you to add text to your screenshot
but I never got around to trying them out, preferring to continue with the simple F6 initiated Gadwin program.
However from time to time I had wanted to capture more of a web page than would fit on one screen without scrolling , even after pressing F11 to remove the header block.A few times I had made multiple screenshots then tried stitching them together in an image editing program.recently I wondered if there was a method of doing this in one go by saving an image of the complete webpage and I googled accordingly and found a Mozilla Firefox "addon' called "screengrab" that does that (and more)
ScreenGrab
Great I thought as I had already installed Firefox in an attempt to overcome problems I was having with Internet Exploder on my old dial up connection
this proved to be very useable as it places a simple and small clickable icon in the task bar tray bottom right
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/tutoria...screengrab.jpg
The snag is that if when using Interrnet Explorer I found that I needed a complete webpage screenshot
I then had to copy and paste the website address into Firefox and screengrab from there.
I then found a similar addon for IE called
iewebshot
that is supposed to add an item to the browser's tools drop down menu
when on a webpage
But it is shareware with only 30 days free and then $12.95
Also I only saw the menu addition once and could not remember what the program was called to reinstall it .I therefore googled again and was delighted to find this time the freeware program
Fire Shot
thie free version of this adds an easily seen activation icon to Internet Explorer's header
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/tutoria..._and_Menus.jpg
I have yet to fully investigate all of the program features but two in particular caught my eye:-
Text and Shape tool: allows you to highlight desired fragment using Rectangular or Elliptical shape
although Elliptical might only come with the paid for Pro version
The provisions for adding text to your screenshots are extensive and you can add pointers and other images
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/tutoria...g_menu_640.jpg
(reduced width screenshot to fit on a corfid page)
So I now have in one fell swoop a single FREE application to do all that I could ever require. I think at this point
Any questions??
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　

Re: Making screenshots

Quote:

Originally Posted by johnfowles (Post 150643)

Many people will say wait a minute there is a "PrintScreen" button on my keyboard, so why get a program at all?
PrintScreen certainly allows you to capture everything that you can see on your monitor and places an image of the complete screen on the clipboard from where you can easily paste it into program such as Microsoft Paint and save from that program
or any other program such as Microsoft Word or Wordpad
But you get the whole screen so if you only want a small portion then you...
　

...then you just press down the CTRL + ALT keys as you hit the Print Screen button:clap:

on Mac it's a bit different but it's still a cinch to capture either the full screen or just the active window (without having to buy or download any redundant software)

agreed, John... screen captures are handy... I realized long ago that most folks would rather learn "how to" do something by viewing a video or looking at screen shot images rather than reading thousands of characters of dry text

Re: Making screenshots

Quote:

Originally Posted by jj (Post 150656)

...then you just press down the CTRL + ALT keys as you hit the Print Screen button:clap:

Err Umm WRONG that will only and if you are lucky capture an "active" part of the screen which may or may not be the smaller area you wanted so I say again you will have to crop

on Mac it's a bit different but it's still a cinch to capture either the full screen or just the active window (without having to buy or download any redundant software)

agreed, John... screen captures are handy... I realized long ago that most folks would rather learn "how to" do something by viewing a video or looking at screen shot images rather than reading thousands of characters of dry text

Good point about MACs Jimmie, thank you for the timely reminder. I had meant to include that fact because some time ago Peterbro had told me that by using a keystroke or keystroke sequence on a MAC one could easily make screenshots, and once Kimberly made one for me on request on her MAC but as for the CTRL+ALT option on Windoze I am never confident that that is going to work so a dedicated screen shot program suits me better.
I have just realised that screenshotting the whole page could be is a handy alternative to saving the web page complete
although the latter of course will preserve any hyperlinks and save any images on the web page.
but as an example I have just saved the entire Small talk shaggy dog story page as a single jpg , that you can scroll through as if it were the real page. It is a large and long file of 1.22 MB so I'll attach it here then if anybody would like to see it you can click on the thumbnail. Opps I cannot attach it because 1.22MB is far over the jpg attachment limit of 500KB, so I have uploaded my own thumbnail together with the full sized original. Now to get the linking syntax right!!
(if you are on a dial up I wouldn't bother clicking the following link!!!)
just read the original thread at
http://www.corfid.com/vbb/showthread.php?t=19504
If your default jpg viewer is Internet Exploder it will open as a small but very long thin image.To read it mouseover to see the plus sign to enlarge it to full size.

CLICK THIS THUMBNAIL:-

http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/tutoria...whole_page.jpg
I GOT IT RIGHT ON MY FOURTH ATTEMPT

Re: Making screenshots

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/scr...screenshot.htm

yeah, Mac OS is more versatile when it comes to these options...regardless, if anyone wants an image that is even more specific than the active window then rather than hold down between 2 and 5 keys (it's like a game of finger twister on the Mac) i just take the whole desktop and paste into any image editor, crop and there you go...btw, Mac comes with 'Grab'...it can be handy ...say hi to kim...haven't seen any of her latest videos of the dogs or the derek :)