This guide is based on an interaction that took place in the Ask a Techo forum.

Don’t you just love reading instructions that have those really helpful pictures of the computer screen so you can see exactly what you need to do? Quite frankly, I’d be just lost without them – “a picture is worth a thousand words” as they say.  If you’ve ever wondered how they’re created, here’s the answer.

What you do is grab a copy of the screen by pressing Alt+PrintScreen on your keyboard. This copies an image of the screen into the windows "clipboard".

Then click the start button on the task bar at the bottom of the screen, then => all programs => accessories => and select the application "Paint".

Once Paint has loaded, click the Edit menu and then select Paste or if you're into shortcuts, press "Ctrl-V" as on the keyboard. This will insert the "screen-grab" into Paint. You can now do basic image manipulation such as "cropping".

When you’re finished, save the image by :

• clicking on the file menu and selecting "save as"
• inserting a filename for your screen-grab
• changing the file type to "JPEG" (this will make the file much smaller)
• make sure you save it in a folder where you can remember.

There are some programs like Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro etc., that give you a greater control over what parts of the screen you select, but these do cost. There are also a bunch of programs that will let you do fancy things (like scroll down and capture long web pages from your web browser).

One freeware program that’s extremely useful once you have captured the screen or whatever, is IrfanView. This allows you to paste your capture and then resize it, crop it and save it into may different file formats. Use it for editing screen shots and also for changing the resolution of camera shots say from 1152 x 865 down to 800 x 600 or 640 x 380, whatever. It is extremely useful when you need to crop pictures to a certain size for inclusion into web pages. Try it - you maybe amazed at what this little program can do and it’s small enough to fit onto a floppy to take anywhere.

If you’re are looking for a good screen capture program for still images Gadwin is very good.

Links:

IrfanView:  http://www.irfanview.com/

Gadwin:  http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/