Painting the Web

Instant in Time: Screenshots

This book is full of images, most of them screenshots of graphics in some form of creation or manipulation, or finished products. The screenshot tools I used for this book also create images for web pages. The only difference is that we typically save the screenshots in JPEG for the Web, which is not a format that works well in a print format.

Operating systems have a built-in capability to get a screenshot. In Windows, pressing the Print Screen key captures a screenshot of the screen, placing the image in the clipboard, which can then be pasted into an editor. Apple provides a utility called Grab that can be used to create screenshots. Grab supports a free format selection, as well as screenshots of windows and the entire screen. You can also do a timed screenshot of the screen if you want to capture the mouse.

These work, but none provide any level of sophistication in capturing screen images. In addition, none of the built-in approaches provide a way to annotate a screenshot once it's been made. Screenshot software can also be used to create screen casts, which are used to make tutorials or demonstrations.

While writing this book, I used three different products to take screenshots in addition to the operating system built-ins: the wildly popular Snag-It for Windows from TechSmith; Faststone's Fast Capture, also for Windows; and beta software for the Mac called Skitch, from Plasq. I liked all three, though they each had their foibles. Searching on "screenshot ...