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Windows Vista

Screenshot

• Screenshot (ScreenDump, Screen Capture) is a picture containing a captured image of the current screen of the computer. The option of capturing the screen is implemented in Windows, but there also exist many other specialized tools for taking screenshots. The resulting image can be edited, printed, e-mailed or saved to internet. Alternatively, a screenshot can be made using a digital camera (however, the speed and quality are usually worse).

Capturing a screenshot in Windows without specialized programs

• When you press the Print Screen (Prt Scr) key, the whole current screen is saved. When you press the combination of keys Alt + Prt Scr, the current window is saved. The image is saved in the memory (clipboard) without any indication that something has happened. In order to be able to work with the image, you have to open a program (ideally a program for editing graphic elements) and paste it from the memory in the program. Then you can save it. In Windows Vista, do the following:
• Start the Paint application: Start - All Programs - Accessories - Paint

Choose Paste from the menu. The image should appear in the edit window where you can easily edit it and save as a file.

Example of pasting a screenshot in the Word application. As in the Paint application, just Paste. The same way you can paste the image in other applications.

Snipping Tool - new application in Windows Vista

The Snipping Tool gives you advanced, easy-to-use options for working with screenshots. [Free-form] enables to select almost any shape on the screen to capture. [Rectangular] enables to select any rectangular shape. [Window] enables selection of a window. Full Screen selects the whole screen.

• After selecting or confirming the selection, the captured image shows in the application window. Using the upper menu you can highlight parts of the image, add notes and save the final image to a file, print it or send by e-mail.

Notes for advanced users

• Capturing screenshots from a video or game is a bit more complicated matter. You can either use a feature built-in a player or in the game, or use specialized programs. If you use the screen capturing feature in Windows, you usually gain a black image.
• Specialized programs - enable advanced features, e.g. automatic saving of screenshots to the disk, more sophisticated capturing options, easy and fast editing of captured images.
• An alternative to the screenshot capture can be the "print to file" feature. E.g. with the PdfCreator program or Adobe PDF you can print to a PDF file (create it).
• The size of the resulting file varies, depending on the used program and file format. The selection of the file type depends on the purpose and the number of colors used in the image. In the following chart you can find examples of sizes of the final files using different formats. The size of a file of the same format can differ according to the used program and advanced settings.

	Photo	Captured window 602x458 (low number of colors)
GIF		48KB (Photoshop)
BMP	758KB	647KB
JPG	79KB	65KB
PNG	561KB	264KB (40KB Photoshop)
TIFF	769KB	352KB
PDF	125KB	70KB
XPS	135KB	85KB
DOC	556KB	60KB
DOCX	540KB	48KB

Related Links

Web links»Software»Graphics»Screen Capture, Screenshot

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