A picture is worth a thousand words, no?

Throughout the month, Steve at Teach42 has been writing about how to become a better blogger. The tip for day 25: Add a picture.

He suggested a few types of pictures that you might include – product logos, mash-ups/charts, stock photos, and screenshots.  That’s the topic I’m interested for the day.

Steve suggested that you might need some third party software to take screenshots on a Windows PC. It’s a common misconception, but entirely untrue. I commented there with some suggestions for screenshot taking, but I thought it’d be a good topic to expand on a bit.

Taking a Screenshot the Easy Way

First, find the screen you want to shoot. Open the website, open the application, start playing the game. Do whatever it is you want to capture.

Then hint the “Print Screen” button.

And… you’re done.

Uhh…. Now What?

Now come the options. When you press the “Print Screen” button (usually found just above the “Insert” button on US-layout keyboards), Windows captures an image of the current screen and stores it on the system’s clipboard. (Note: The mouse cursor is not displayed in this screenshot).

In order to make the screenshot useful you need to get it out of the Clipboard and into an image editing program.

The simplest thing to do would be to use Microsoft Paint, since it’s built into every Windows system. After opening paint, hit Ctrl-V to paste the image onto the canvas. (Note: You could also go to Edit -> Paste, or right click on the canvas and choose Paste.)

The document should automatically resize to include the entire image. If you only wanted a screenshot of part of the screen, use the rectangle tool to outline the portion you want to keep, then click on Image -> Crop. This will resize the canvas to include only the selected portion of the image.

No third party application necessary.

But a Third Party App Wouldn’t Hurt…

It’s certainly unnecessary to download or buy anything to take a screenshot in Windows. However, it would be helpful to have a more powerful image editing program than Paint.

My two favorites: GIMP and Inkscape. Both are Open Source, therefore both are legally free. They’re also awesome.

GIMP is a photo/image editing program similar to Adobe Photoshop. Most of what you could do in Photoshop can also be done in GIMP. I’m pretty sure you can do just about everything, but I’m not experienced enough with either to know for sure.

You might, for example, shade the entire screenshot and only highlight a certain portion of it to draw the viewer’s attention to something important. 

Although you can paste screenshots directly into GIMP, it won’t automatically resize the canvas like Paint does. In order to do that, you should use the File -> Acquire -> Paste as New option (Ctrl-Shift-V is the keyboard shortcut).

So… go take some screenshots and use them on your blog. Shoo.