A screen capture tool is a very very useful thing to have.
I actually wonder how I lived without one... 
Even for that little confused emoticon you’ve just seen above, I used a screen capture tool to capture it from google’s image search.
In fact, with most of the images on this blog, I used a screen capture tool so that I can visually present what I am talking about.
Here is what a screen capture tool does for me.
- I take an image or picture snap shot of anything I am looking at on my screen. It doesn’t matter whether I am using Microsoft Word or browsing on the internet. As long as it is on my screen, I can take a picture of it. Whatever it is.
- I can then save the picture in any format I want. I usually save my pictures in the jpeg format. There are many other formats including pdf, tiff, png, tiff etc.
- Once I save the picture, I then copy and paste it where I want; into a word document or into my blog for example, exactly like the emoticon above. I can even open up the picture in an image editor to make some changes to it.
Like I said, I don’t know how I did things without this handy little tool. If it was an image online, I would have had to right click the image, and then download the image using the Save As option…then wait a few minutes for the image to download. Ha, not anymore I don’t.
If the image was in a pdf, word document or some other application, I would have to perform gymnastics to get an image out. Not anymore. I just snap shot everything now.
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The Screen Capture tool I am using at the moment is called FastStone Capture ver.5.3.
You can download this free software at this link: ScreenCapture
My summation of FastStone Capture:
The Good:
You can take screen shots using different methods including drawing a free form line around the exact section that you want to capture.
It has a built in editor for some basic image editing.
I can share the images I have captured with You!
This tool is also portable which means I can take it with me on my USB flash drive, just in case I have to use somebody else’s computer.
The Bad:
I would like some built in editing functionality like adding text boxes and shapes like arrows to the pictures I have captured. At the moment I am using Paint for that type of stuff.
But in short, this is a brilliant little tool: 
