Screen Captures

Need easy way to make and edit a screen capture

[TomJones]

Can anyone help me with capturing an open window as a jpg/gif image? I want to show what my second website pages will look like on my first site. I found a little program that captures webpages that can be emailed but, they must be opened in an email program as an EML file. Is there a simple way to do this or convert EMLs into JPG? Thanks!

[korkus2000]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld TomJones,

Are you using windows? Do you have a graphics program?

[DrDoc]

Assuming that you're a PC user, and that you have Windows:

1) Open the new page in your browser
2) Press the

Print Screen

key on your keyboard
3) Open your graphics program
4) Open a New document
5) Just hit Ctrl-V to paste

Now you can modify the image any way you want

[RBuzz]

If you're looking for an app to do your screen captures, SnagIt is loverly.
[techsmith.com...]

[TomJones]

The Print Screen /ctrl+V worked great. Are all graphic programs going to be about equal with this (Adobe vs. Macromedia) in terms of quality? I'll check the SnagIt prog out, too. Thanks for the link.

I can tell this is a great site. Lucky for me the Newbee to stumble upon it. I hope I can further contribute to the quality. Does this site like to be linked? >>>> Is that a silly question?

[DrDoc]

Yes, all graphics programs should be eequal .. at least up until you choose to save the image. Using Print Screen makes an uncompressed copy of the current screen using the same color depth currently set for your monitor. So, if you're using 256 colors, the image will be in 256 colors .. etc.

The only thing that could affect the image quality when you paste it is if the program has any limit for working file size. As far as I know that should not be a proble. Even old Paint can handle it ;)

[txbakers]

Also from techsmith is a program called Camtasia - fabulous for making captures of multiple screens. I use it for help files. I make AVI files and stream them.

[TomJones]

Man, I need to write all this down! Thanks for the support!

[mahlon]

That reminds me, is there any way to capture a screen with a paused DVD or avi? Those do not seem to work for me. Will SnagIt work for this?

[joshie76]

Unless they've written some quite special anti-capture routine into the DVD player then snagIt should capture it fine. In fact snagIt can even capture motion video!

The motion video capture can even be used like the old ScreenCam which is great for eLearning and the like (and these can now be directly embedded into your flash movies since the release of MX).

[kiwanji]

Sometimes there is no need to use anything more sophisticated than the Paint program that comes with every machine. Do the Print Screen and Ctrl-V into Paint and depensing on the version of Paint you have you can save the image as either a .jpg or a .gif (learning which image type to use has been extremely helpful to me - just type in ".jpg vs. .gif" into google and get a ton of helpful web sites for understanding which image to use and when to use it.

Throwing a monkey wrench into the mix has been the recent acceptance of the .png file type. I am not sure how far back the .png is supported (which versons of Netscape and IE) but from what I have gathered the .png is more compressed and loses less data in that compression.

I did hear that the .png was supposed to be a vector image, but I have not seen that as fact. Fireworks uses the .png as default and any image I create in Fireworks does not scale like I expect a vector image to. Does anyone have any thoughts/suggestions on this?

[aspdaddy]

If you just want to copy the active window (not the whole screen) use alt->Print Screen.

[tedster]

I never knew that - thanks. It's gonna save me a lot of cropping!

[kiwanji]

aspdaddy-

Does this work for just a window or will it work for dialog boxes also?

[korkus2000]

kiwanji - yes it should just capture the active modal, dialogue, window. This includes js alerts, confirm boxes, and the like.

[bill]

If you just want to copy the active window (not the whole screen) use alt->Print Screen

That's a huge time saver. Thank you.

[Brett_Tabke]

NetMechanic has a nifty tool:
[netmechanic.com...]