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Screenshots
In many computer manuals, magazines and Internet pages —in this website too— you often see images displaying the interface of a program, as it is seen in the computer screen. These images are created taking advantage of an interesting possibility of the computer, called screen capture or screenshot. The uses of the screen captures are multiple, as we’ll discuss now. Anything we see on the screen can become a normal image, which later may be used as illustration, example, part of a tutorial and so on.
How to capture a screen.
No special program is necessary: to capture the screen is a property of the Windows system itself (although specialized utilities exist, which allow more options.) In order to capture the screen, that is, to take a snapshot from what one sees in the screen, there is a very easy system that we may try right now. It is enough with following these simple instructions:
- Prepare in your screen whatever you want to capture... it may be this same page, or whatever you wish.
- Now press the PrintScreen key on your keyboard: it is located to the right, between the numeric and alphabetical keys (see the attached illustration.) This will “shoot” the whole screen; to capture only the active window, press Alt + PrintScreen.
- Open the painting program that you use normally, for example Paintshop Pro. In it, create a new image: File|New. Next, we choose in Edition|Paste. And there you have it: the screen that we have captured appears. Now it is an image, a snapshot of what you had on your screen a moment ago. We can manipulate it as we want, as any image, and save it as such.
- Alternatively, the screen capture can be pasted directly in any program, for example in Word, as an illustration.
Trick : with the screen capture, as you might imagine, you are limited to a maximum area equivalent to the screen size of your system. If we work normally at 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 and we want to capture a bigger area, we have to enlarge the screen momentarily (for example, to 1024 x 768.) The area you can capture now will be remarkably greater (see the attached image.)
Although they are not necessary, as we already mentioned, there are some specific programs for screen capture, and some are freeware or shareware, such as MWsnap, Capture Express 2000 , WinGrab 1.2a , 20/20 2.1 ScreenShooter 1.0 AnalogX, and many more.
Some painting programs also include some extra utility for screen captures; for example PaintShop pro includes an interesting utility that allows to capture with some additional features, like trimming the desired part from the visible area. Irfanview, another very popular image viewer, has an advanced Capture utility which lets you capture with many options, even saving automatically to a folder.
Applications of screenshots
Which applications does the screen capture have? The most obvious perhaps is to illustrate the operation of computer programs. It also may be used to show a listing of the contents of a folder or a diskette, showing the folders and files in the Windows explorer as icons, or as a list. We can capture and make a printout, o save it as a graphic. Idea: you can use this trick to create a visual map image of the contents of a website.
With a screen capture we can also take advantage of the images created in a save-disabled program demo. So you may not only learn to use these programs, but also have a workaround to save some of what you’ve been working at. In principle, this is a valid idea for screen resolutions (72–96 dpi.) It is not impossible, however, to capture even bigger areas: you only have to pan (move) the visible area and to capture several pieces, then rejoin them as a single image. The limitation of this technique is clear: when taking a screenshot, which we get is a bitmap. It won’t keep, evidently, neither the vectorial objects, the layers or layouts, and the text is no longer editable.
If you want to create some instructional material with your screenshots, for example demonstrate how some program works, there are special utilities like Wink (free) and several commercial programs now distributed by Macromedia, such as Captivate. This kind of program is specialised in taking and linking several screenshots, adding captions and transition effects to create a sophisticated video-like training material.
