Screenshots of my PC

Screenshots of my PC: a reader asks..

I have a Windows 10 PC and would like to take screenshots from time to time. Is there a good utility to do that?

My favorite utility for screen captures is SnagIt from Techsmith. I’ve found it to be exceedingly smart and intuitive, and offers a lot of flexibility in image editing. I can add graphics, text, or layer images. While it’s no Photoshop, it does offer all the basic tools needed to manipulate images. It can even capture video and audio from your screen, with just basic features. For a more comprehensive video capture tool, try their Camtasia app. SnagIt is a premium screen capture utility app and may be more than you need.

You may be fine with using the perfectly good screen capture utility built right into Windows 10, called Snip and Sketch. This uses the standard Windows invisible clipboard to hold your screen capture. With a special key combination:

Press the Windows key and the Shift key and the S key at the same time to start a screen image capture.

You then drag your cursor to highlight what you want to capture (click and hold at the top-left corner and drag to the bottom-right). That places it in your clipboard and in a few moments you’ll get a standard Windows 10 notification popup which you can click to open the screen capture in Sketch mode. Sketch mode has drawing tools to let you annotate the screen capture, save it as an image, etc. You can also choose a different capture shape: choose from rectangle, freeform (draw around the item you want to capture), an entire window, or your entire screen. When you activate Snip & Sketch with the above key combination, you get a little box at the top where you can choose one of these options.

With that image in your clipboard you can then paste it into something else (document, email, etc.). Please note that your clipboard by default only holds one item at a time. As soon as you copy something else, your previous item in the clipboard is gone forever. But this default activity is also changeable, press the Windows key and the V key at the same time to either turn on Clipboard History or access it. Clipboard history holds up to 25 past screen snips at a time, and you can make an older snip available for pasting (press Ctrl and V key) into another document.

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