Blogging Tips

While blogging we come across many nice and useful websites and softwares, being bloggers we want to write about them. Most of us still using Print Screen and then going to either Paintbrush or Photoshop to copy the screenshot, edit it and save it.

Using Photoshop is good, the images come out the quality you want but you must be willing to deal with the slow response of the applications, since Photoshop requires a lot of resources. It also takes a while to do just getting screenshot and editing – resizing or drawing arrows to interesting parts.

Unlike Photoshop Paintbrush is lighter but it gives you less options editing your screenshot, quality of the picture is sadly not high enough.

I would like to share one of my favorite softwares in Windows – FastStone Capture, it’s a lightweight screenshot capturing software. It’s free(for home user), and what is even better you can download it in exe format(installer), compressed zip file(some networks ban downloading exe files) and as a stand alone portable format, also compressed zip file.

So, if you have your own PC, you can install, if you tend to hang around using other PCs you can have it on your memory stick/USB flash drive, it allows you to run from the folder directly – no installation whatsoever is needed.

Now, let’s look at the features!

• A small floating Capture Panel that can be dragged anywhere or minimized to the Windows tray area
• Resource friendly – uses a very small amount of memory, especially when minimized to the Windows tray area
• Global hotkeys to activate the program’s capture capabilities anytime, anywhere
• Efficient tools to capture windows, objects, full screen, rectangle/freehand-selected regions and scrolling areas
• Capture web pages in Microsoft Internet Explorer, FireFox and Opera
• Option to specify destination (internal editor, clipboard, file or printer) where the captured image will be sent
• Text/Arrowed line/Highlight/Watermark annotation
• Drop-shadow, torn-edge and fade-edge effects
• Add caption
• Resize, crop, zoom in/out
• Undo/Redo
• Support external editors, which allows you to add virtually unlimited editing capabilities to the program
• Save as BMP, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, GIF, TIFF, TGA and PDF
• Send e-mails
• Screen magnifier
• Screen color picker
• Support multiple monitors
• Option to run when Windows starts

From my personal experience I’d like to add that except just taking excellent screenshots, it allows you to write and draw on the taken screenshots, pick colors from the screen, zoom in, adjust hotkeys for the software, capture scrolling windows, can have output directed to clipboard, file and much much more.

I believe it’s a must have software for a blogger. So if you still capturing screenshots the old way, it’s time you change it with FastStone!

For home users it’s free, if you want to use it for commercial use you will have to purchase license for $29.95.