Use FastStone Capture for All of your Screen Capturing Needs
Screen capturing may be small but a very useful feature that we use on almost daily basis for a variety of purposes, for example to capture snapshots of an installed software for documentation, blog postings or for illustration purposes. Windows users can use the Print Screen feature to capture a snapshot of the current activity on the computer screen. But this minimalistic option do not offer much flexibility, for example what if you want to capture a screen region, a window or a scrolling window? Print Screen will not offer you such options and you will have to resort to some third-party software to fulfill these needs.
There are a number of third-party freeware applications available that can serve the purpose for most of the users but some of these applications are standouts, either in terms of features or usability. Today, I am going to recommend you such a utility that offers all the essentials such screen capturing, window capturing, region capturing and also some extra features that are really useful. This application I am referring to is called FastStone Capture. It has the perfect combination of features and ease of use. It is fast and responsive to load and use, has light memory footprint and no feature bloat as almost all the provided features are really useful.
All the screen capturing features can be accessed from the floating toolbar(control panel) or you can control screen capturing functionality using the hotkeys.
Here is a quick look at all the features that are provided:
- A small floating Capture Panel that can be dragged anywhere or minimized to the Windows tray area
- Resource friendly – uses a very small amount of memory, especially when minimized to the Windows tray area
- Global hotkeys to activate the program’s capture capabilities anytime, anywhere
- Efficient tools to capture windows, objects, full screen, rectangle/freehand-selected regions and scrolling areas
- Capture web pages in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera
- Option to specify destination (internal editor, clipboard, file or printer) where the captured image will be sent
- Text/Arrowed line/Highlight/Watermark annotation
- Drop-shadow, torn-edge effects
- Add caption
- Resize, crop, zoom in/out
- Undo/Redo
- Save as BMP, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, GIF, TIFF, TGA and PDF
- Send e-mails
- Screen magnifier, Screen color picker
- Multi-monitor support
- Option to run when Windows starts
- And many more …
This is a highly recommended screen capturing application, and I am using it myself for quite sometime now without experiencing any issue.
Latest version of this application is not free but you can get the last freeware version (5.3) from here.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Tags: capturing, screen, screen capturing, Software, WindowsRelated posts
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Comments
Perfect timing! I have a photo blog in the works and I was planning on lots of tutorials on the site. This will give me the tool I need to make them easy to understand.
yeah! Snag It is also great. But most of the features that I need are already there in FS Capture and now I have got used to it.
Good Review on this utility …. many bloggers don’t spend much time on such posts..COngrats.. a blog worth reading..
I like photography very much.I would like to appreciate for your lengthy and attractive description.Thanks for sharing the knowledge….
Great recommendation. One of my clients is currently using Print Key 2000, and it always crashes. I think we could look at this as a possible replacement!
Good utility, I use Snag It and Windows Print screen.