Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Take screenshots of your desktop with PicPick

Posted: 23 Sep 2009 03:08 AM PDT

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. It would also be safe to say that a screen shot is worth its weight in gold when trying to effectively communicate thoughts and ideas. Trying to verbally walk someone through a process in Windows is not impossible, however, showing them what screens they will encounter makes it that much easier.

There are numerous programs on the market, which can take screen shots. Some of them are commercial based software, while others are freeware applications found on popular download websites. The abilities of these type of programs range from simple screen capture to having an image editor bundled in with it. The add on pieces may be nice, but what you really want to figure out is how well a particular program handles screen shots.

PicPick is one such tool that not only does an excellent job with screen captures, but a nice lineup of image editing tools. Billed as an “all-in-one” type program, the screen shot part of the program performs quite well. After installing PicPick, and running the program, it sits quietly on your Start bar.

Since we are looking into screen shots, the first thing you will want to do is access the options menu for the screen capture hot keys. To do this from the Start bar icon, right-click and select Program Options from the menu choices. Once in the Program Options menu, click on Hot Keys to view the available key combinations for creating screen shots.

The top half of this menu covers the screen capture utility. The lower half lists the hot keys combination for the other tools in PicPick. Notice that while PicPick is running the PrintScreen key now operates as a hotkey extension. When running Windows normally, pressing PrintScreen will put a screen shot to the clipboard, and then you have to open a separate image editing program to paste the screen shot into.

With PicPick turned on, the screen shot will automatically be loaded into PicPick. Assuming we just pressed print screen, we will go into PicPick and see our image. Enter the Editor by double-left clicking on the Start bar icon.

By default, our new screen capture is named Image 1. Pressing PrintScreen a second time will create another image (Image 2) in a new tab within PicPick. While the image editor is open, each subsequent screen capture will get its own tab. To save the image, left-click in the upper left-hand corner, and then select Save, or Save As should you wish to change the file name. Taking screen captures has been whittled down to a short process with PicPick.

Within the PicPick editor, you may notice a familiar interface. The Ribbon Bar similar to Office 2007 appears here. The bar is separated in a few different sections, and not too cluttered. The first section, as seen above, contains Zoom functions, Paste options, and the blue icon button akin to the File button in many Windows applications.

To the right of Zoom and Paste, PicPick has a set of tools covering photo alterations. Here we can resize and rotate an image. Clicking on the Effects button will bring up some common image editing utilities. Though screen captures typically come out better than images from digital cameras, it is good to know you have some options for image tweaking.

Next the Effects tools, you are presented with a set of drawing options. These include the Select tool, Paintbrush, Eraser, Fill, as well as drawing rectangles, circles, rounded rectangles, lines, and text. If you click on a tool, such as the rounded rectangle tool, you will have addition options to pick from. With this drawing item, you can choose empty, filled with border, or fill without border. You may also select the pixel width of the border.

Using the line tool is a little different however. Should you click on the button with three period marks, you are able to customize the line to be a line or arrow. You can also change several aspects to a drawn arrow such as the type of arrow tip, the type of end, and whether or not it will be outlined.

Further towards the right-hand side of the ribbon bar, you will notice the color palette. Here you can choose from a variety of colors, beyond the default black and white. You also have a color picker tool, which helps when you prefer to utilize the colors in the screen shot instead of the color palette.

When you completed any additional desired editing, you can go back to the blue tab in the upper left-hand corner of the PicPick window. Below is a screen capture of the available options underneath this selection. From this menu, you can choose a Capture function, bring up one of PicPick’s other image tools, or send the image to another program (MS Paint, Photoshop, or other application on your computer).

It is a given that PicPick covers a wide selection of image editing abilities. This one program could easily replace a handful of image type applications on your Windows computer. Thankfully, PicPick is not too overbearing with what it can do, and the extras do not distract from its core functionality of taking good screen shots.