Blogs that use images have better readability. Personally, I use an image in every blog post, no matter what. I’ve forced myself to do this a long time ago. It’s not that hard to do. Here’s a great tool that can help you.
Ever wonder how other bloggers get those amazing screen grabs and images with arrows and pointers and all that fun stuff in their blog entries? Well, so did I. I have always used Photoshop to do that manually, which is a big pain in the butt.
Until recently, a co-worker turned me onto a program called FastStone Capture. Oh yeah, it’s free too!
FastStone Capture is a powerful, flexible and intuitive screen-capture utility. It allows you to capture anything on the screen including windows, objects, full screen, rectangle regions, freehand-selected regions and scrolling windows/web pages. It has innovative features such as a floating Capture Panel, hotkeys, resizing, cropping, text annotation, printing, e-mailing, screen magnifier and many more.
Features include…
* 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
* And many more …
I’ve had enough of free tools, only few of them are good to use. I prefer using Pr Scr and picasa, they are enough for taking screenshots. I used demobuilder to create flash based demos for my site and blog. but resently I found a new tool to make true color demos (demobuilder only creates 256 colors demos), that is wondershare democreator. it’s really a nice gadget to demonstrate my computer.
Thanks, Jim – for the tip! I learn way too much here at your blog – you should have a membership fee! ;)
@Lisa, Glad to hear that!!!
@Ramon, you’re tired of free? lol
Thank you Jim… For sharing really good idea of keeping up to date the blog …. I really got many new ideas though your blog….