Download of the Week: Greenshot

Posted 06/14/2010 at 8:18am | by David Murphy

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I don't exactly know how often you take screenshots. As you might guess, I take a ton of screenshots--far more, on a weekly basis, than I'd ever care to take. But I'm not here to brag. I'm here to show you how you can take screenshots with greater detail and precision than the ol' default technique: Jamming print screen, saving a huge bitmap file, downloading an open-source photo editing program, cropping it, saving it, and... doing it all again.

Ugh.

Seriously though, that's the typical process I go through in order to snap pics of applications and what-have-you. A handy open-source application called Greenshot isn't the saving grace for my woes--and, yes, I realize there are more complete screen-shot-taking apps out there today--but it does provide an extra level of control that's a good step between "Print Screen" and Jing.

With Greenshot, one can use a simple combination of keyboard commands to define the size of the capture box immediately prior to Windows snapping the picture. That, or just use the default printscreen button--Greenshot transforms this from a full-screen capture into a region-defined capture, which you paint directly onto the screen as if you were drawing a box around a bunch of files.

Once you've snapped your shot, you can use the program's built-in image editor to further refine your final image. If you're confident in your snapping skills, however, you can also tell Greenshot to dump your initial capture into a file by default. And if neither of those sound very appealing, you can always just have to program resort to Windows' default technique--dumping your shot to the clipboard and calling it a night.

Each week, Maximum PC picks a new free or shareware download as its favorite of... the week. Have a nifty application that you can't live without? Twitter David Murphy @acererak with your latest suggestions.