Music's Place

Taking a snapshot of what is shown on your computer screen.

In early stages of blog tinkering found self wondering how to take a screen snapshot of  what is displayed on the monitor. You may have notcied the image is actually that of an earlier post? Yes there may exist many useful free and not so free applications to accomplish the task and perhaps with greater ease. I guess to many seasoned professionals out there this is kindergarten level but here’s hoping this post is useful to at least one person. Note information is for a windows based PC platform.

Anyway continuing here is a simple method to take that screenshot using only basic windows applications.

1. Press the Print Screen key.
2. Open Windows Paint (Press Start> Programs> Accessories and select Edit>Paste.) The screen shot will appear. Note: If you only want to save the current window (for example the smaller active window sitting above the undesired larger window), press ALT Print Screen.
3. Perform all your necessary cropping or alterations to the picture and then;
4. Save it as either in ’GIF’ (preferred) or ‘JPG’ (better for colourful pictures) format. 

If the GIF or JPG options don’t appear in your version of Paint, then you won’t be able to use it for screen shots unless you save as BMP file and rework the file by saving the picture into a word document and then save that word document as an html file where you then need to select the picture and by the time you get to there them free screen capture programs start looking a great deal more attractive.

Oops a thought has triggered maybe a photostudio type program can be used to resave the BMP file into JPG format i.e. if your basic paint program does not allow for the aforementioned file types. Using a program such as paintshop will ease the whole process and definitely eases editing of saved pictures.

I’m aware that there are many other elements to consider from the resampling of an image, to losing the cursor key on screen capture, perhaps size and quality of picture to publish as to not slow down their web page loads, etc. For now I only wanted to share a basic tidbit of personal webbing discoveries.