Taking screen caps in Windows is not the most straightforward activity, at least out of the box. You hit Print Screen (or Alt-Print Screen to grab a window), paste it into your favourite image editing program, crop it and then save it out as a JPEG or PNG. Thankfully, NoVirusThanks’s Desktop Hunter streamlines the entire process.
Once installed, you can open the app and configure options for shortcut keys, file formats and compression options. You can even specific an output folder, so screen caps are automatically converted to your desired format and saved off, ready for use.
It’s extremely easy to use, though the configuration window is a little coarse compared to the program’s starting front-end. That’s a minor quibble and very excusable, considering the variety of settings you can tweak, including the GIF compression mode and bitmap bit-depth.
A nice addition would be the option to run the PNGs through an optimiser such as Ken Silverman’s PNGOUT, but that can be taken care of manually via a batch file.
Desktop Hunter [NoVirusThanks, via AddictiveTips]
illogical
Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 2:03 PMi’d like to say that a much sexier combination is Lightshot and Screensnapr. i use prtsrn for lightshot, and there’s easy shortcuts you can use on the highlighted area, e.g ctrl+c, ctrl+s…. snapr is programmed to my F7, and lets me instantly screen and upload a portion on my screen for others to see.
Logan Booker
Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 3:04 PMThanks for the suggestion illogical, I’ll have to check it out.
Stove
Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 3:49 PMI’m a fan of wisdomsoft screenhunter. It lets you modify every single aspect of what it captures and how to save it, and then gets out of your way so you can work.
Vlat
Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 3:52 PMI’m a mac user but when on windows use http://getgreenshot.org/ which gives the same sort of functionality as the mac screen shot utility, and as a bonus is free!
George
Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 7:20 PMI use Greenshot myself for this – reading above, greenshot does all that and more. Also open source. http://getgreenshot.org/
Phillip
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 1:18 AMYou forgot Vista and 7′s primitive albeit functioning Snipping Tool.
MotorMouth
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 11:09 AMReally? This is a difficult task? ALT+PRTSCN, CTRL+V (or CTRL+N, CTRL+V in Photoshop), CTRL+S? Or use the Snipping Tool. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Ollie
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 12:41 PM*shrugs* I’ll stick with Snagit.
JD
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 6:33 PMI find Zscreen pretty useful http://code.google.com/p/zscreen/
smurfydog
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 8:53 PMI use Ashampoo Snap for making tutorials. I’ll check out some of the other suggestions here though as it’s not perfect.