Take a screenshot of anything on your PC
Capture images of your screen with Windows’ hidden tools
Apicture tells a thousand words and this is never truer than when you’re trying to describe a problem with your PC to someone attempting to help you fix it. Reciting long, sprawling error codes or outlining just which bit of a program has frozen can feel like a game of charades at times – so knowing how to take a screenshot of whatever’s on your screen can save time and help you explain a problem more clearly. Here, we show you how to master Windows’ screencapture tools and explain how to take pictures of your BIOS and entire web pages, and create frame-by-frame stills from video footage.
Use Windows’ screenshot tools
The Print Screen button (usually located above the cursor keys and abbreviated to Prtscrn) is the first thing you need to locate before you can start taking screenshots. Pressing this copies whatever’s on your screen – or screens if you use more than one monitor – to the clipboard. The next step is to open an art program such as Paint or Paint.net and paste the screenshot (Ctrl+v). You can then crop and edit the screenshot as you would any other image.
But, there are plenty of other handy tricks when taking a screenshot in Windows. For example, if you want to take a screenshot of a specific program, Windows can capture that alone. Click the program window you’re interested in, then press and hold Alt+print Screen. Open Paint again, then paste the screenshot and you’ll see that this time only the selected program window has been pasted. Windows 8 and 10 users can bypass the copy and paste process entirely. Pressing the Windows key+print Screen key combination saves a screenshot to the
C:\users\your Username\ Pictures\screenshots
folder. Your screen will briefly become dimmer as the screenshot is captured and saved.
Unfortunately, this option isn’t available in Windows 7, but there’s a similar feature available if you use Microsoft Onedrive on Windows 7. To save screenshots to the Pictures folder of your Onedrive account, right-click Onedrive’s icon (the blue cloud) in the notifications area on your taskbar and select Settings. Go to the ‘Auto save’ tab, tick ‘Automatically save screenshots I capture to Onedrive’ (see screenshot above) and click OK. From now on, pressing Print Screen will save a screenshot to Onedrive’s Pictures\screenshots folder.
Share screenshots more easily
If you’re in the habit of sharing screenshots via email or social media, Windows 8 and 10 provide a quick way to do this. Press the Windows key+h to bring up the Share menu (see screenshot left) and then click any of the Windows apps listed to share your screenshot using that app.
Edit screenshots with the Snipping Tool
There will often be times when you need to edit a screenshot so that it better suits your purposes. Windows’ Snipping Tool lets you capture a more relevant screenshot that requires less (or no) post-editing. It lets you select a specific area of the screen
area of the screen to capture, for example. One benefit of the Snipping tool is you can take screenshots on PCS without a Print Screen key. To open the tool, click Start, type snipping tool and press Enter (if you think you’ll use this tool regularly, right-click Snipping Tool in the search results, then click ‘Pin to taskbar’).
When the tool opens you’ll notice your screen fades slightly and the usual cursor is replaced by a ‘+’ symbol. Click and hold the left mouse button and draw a box around the area you want to screen-shot (see screenshot above). When you’re happy with your selection release the mouse button and the screenshot will appear in a pop-up window. Click File, then Save As to save it to your PC.
Capture the mouse cursor
You may notice one significant difference between the screenshots in our feature and those you take yourself – the presence of the cursor. Windows’ tools won’t capture the position of your cursor in the screenshots you take. To rectify this you need to download a program called Picpick ( http://ngwin. com/picpick).
When you install Picpick its icon is added to the notification area in your taskbar. Right-click this icon and click Program Options, then click Capture, tick ‘Include cursor image’ (see screenshot above), then click OK. While you’re in Program Options you should also click General, untick the ‘Run Picpick when Windows starts’ box, then click OK. This stops Picpick slowing your PC by preventing it from loading when your PC boots. When you want to use Picpick, open it from within the Start menu instead.
Now when you press the Print Screen button (or Alt+print Screen for a specific program or window) Picpick will open and display the screenshot you’ve taken complete with cursor. To save the screenshot, click File, Save As, then select the image format. We’d suggest the PNG format because this tends to be sharper and more accurate than most without taking up too much hard-drive space. Look out for more on Picpick in next issue’s Secret Tips (page 48).
How to screenshot the BIOS
So far, our tips have focussed entirely on Windows, but if your PC is faulty, it could be you need a screenshot of your BIOS. You could always use your phone to photograph the BIOS, but there is a better way.
Insert a blank USB stick into your PC, right-click it in File Explorer and choose Format. Select ‘Fat32’ from the ‘File system’ dropdown, tick Quick Format, then click Start. Next, reset the PC and boot into the BIOS (your PC manual will explain how to this, but it usually involves pressing Delete, F2 or F10 repeatedly as your PC boots). Once the BIOS has loaded, navigate to the screen you want to screenshot, then press the F12 key to save a screenshot to the USB stick. Note: the F12 key works for most PCS, but not all – check your manual if it doesn’t work for you.
Take a clear still from a video
Capturing a still from a video, whether a home movie or Hollywood film can be tricky. Using the methods we described earlier will work to an extent, but will often result in blurred images. To take crisp, clear screenshots it’s better to use our favourite movie player, VLC ( www. snipca.com/21770).
Open VLC, then open the video you want to take a still from. Click the Pause button at the start of the video, then View, followed by Advanced Controls. This adds four icons above the Play button (Record, ‘Take a snapshot’, Loop and ‘Frame by frame’). Fast-forward the video to the section you want using the progress slider and click the ‘Frame by frame’ button. This pauses the video, click the button repeatedly to move the video on in tiny increments until you see the image you want to capture. Press the ‘Take a snapshot’ button (see screenshot above) and your screenshot will be saved to your Pictures folder.