How to do a simple screen capture

On another thread, a member suggested a topic on how to do a screen capture. That seemed to make sense to me, so here is my attempt at a topic on how to do a simple screen capture

With Windows machines or Macs, capturing what appears on your monitor is a fairly simple deal.

On Windows machines, hold down <Ctrl> and simultaneously press "Print Screen", which will capture the monitor's display to your clipboard. Then open Paint or any other graphics editor, and paste the clipboard contents into the graphics editor - you can do so via right-click-and-select-"Paste", or by holding down <Ctrl> while simultaneously pressing "V", or through the "Paste" option from the graphics editor's toolbar.

As opposed to capturing the entire screen, you also can capture just the active window (the one your mouse pointer is in) by holding down <ALT> and simultaneously pressing Print Screen. Proceed from there as outlined above.

On Macs, its pretty similar. The keys are Shift - Apple - 3 or Shift - Apple - 4, depending on your Mac OS. In OSX, Shift - Apple - 4 will turn your pointer into a sorta bullseye deal - click and select the screen area you wish to capture, and when you release the click, the designated area is saved to your hard drive as a PDF file named "Picture 1" or whatever number it happens to be in that session. If you hold down the Control key while clicking the bullseye, the image is captured to your clipboard, and can be pasted into any graphics editor.

OSX users also have the Grab utility, available in Applications/Utility. Open Grab, select Capture>Timed Screen. From the dialog that opens, click "Start Timer", then click the menu item describing what you wish to capture, holding the click until the dialog closes and the image appears; save it wherever is convenient.

Greater control and more flexibility is available through 3rd-party screen capture utilities. There are lots of 'em, some free, some for-fee. Capture, from AnalogX, is a free capture utility for Windows (All), and Irfanview is a free Windows (All) graphics editor-media player Swiss-Army-Knife sorta app which offers a somewhat flexible screen capture feature - I use it a lot. It may not be ultra sophisticated, but it is reliable and efficient.


Now ... after all that, I figure you're either thoroughly confused or pretty nearly up to speed on screen captures. :wink: