Screen Captures
Oddly, I had to write up something for my ICS students about how to do a screen capture today. During that, I found out that Paint on Windows XP will now save GIF, JPG, and PNG formats! In the past, it could only handle BMP (bitmaps), which are huge files that you don't want to put on any website.
Anyway, Paint is found under Start -> Programs -> Accessories. Just hit
Prnt Scrn or "Alt + Prnt Scrn" to copy the image (as demo-ed in class). Then open Paint, and hit Ctrl-V (or go up to Edit->Paste). And save!Now you don't need to mess with downloading, installing, and using the GIMP, which is rather troublesome. Paint doesn't do much more beyond what I just described though, so if you need to do any thing fancier than just saving, I still think the GIMP is still worth learning (since it's free!). Also, Paint seemed to produce a rather crappy GIF image. PNG turned out okay though.
Anyway, just thought I'd share my discovery of an easier way to do it!
posted by Zach @ 2:28 AM
1 Comments:
Thanks, Zach. Very handy.
For the Mac users in the class, OS X has a Utility called "Grab" that will do high-quality screen captures. The big drawback to Grab is that it saves the images as TIFF files, which won't work on the web (but are great for print docs). Grab lets you specify the screen, the window, or a selection (the selection feature is very nice for details).
Shift + Command + 3 on the Mac will generate a capture of the screen as a PDF file, which you'll have to open with Gimp or Photoshop and convert to GIF, JPEG, or PNG for the web. Grab will probably produce slightly better images overall.
Either way, you have to convert to a browser-supported image file.
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