How
do I make a screen shot? I've been asked this question many times so I
figured a short tutorial was in order. Maybe you don't know what a screen
shot is. Its literaly a picture of what is being displayed on your computers
monitor. You can do this very easily by pressing the "Print Screen"
key on your keyboard. Its usually just to the right of the F12 key. When
you press the "Print Screen" key, an image of what is currently
displayed on your monitor is stored in what is called the clipboard. Monitors
must allow for screen shots to be taken but as far as I know all modern
monitors do. To see the image after you have stored the screen shot in
the clipboard, open any image editing program you have (most word processing
programs and desktop publishing programs will also open a screen shot image
as they are in BMP format) and click on "Edit" then "Paste"
or simply press the "CTRL" and "V" keys at the same time
(CTRL+V) to paste the image into the application.
Thats all fine and dandy, but with
PSP7 (and earlier versions of PSP) there is a terrific screen shot feature
built into the program. Any images used in this tutorial were made using
the "Screen Capture" feature of PSP7. You might find this a little
tricky if you try it yourself, as you will find that you can not make a
screen shot of PSP7 using PSP7! The trick is to install PSP7 twice. If
you have seperate hard drives this is easy to do, simply install PSP7 on
one drive then install on another drive. If you only have one hard drive,
don't use the default directory when doing the second install of PSP7,
which is the "Programs" folder. Install it directly to the "C"
drive or in a folder other than the "Programs" folder. Or just use
the "Print Screen" key to import screen shots of PSP7 into PSP7
for editing if you want to. You can't take advantage of some of the options
of PSP7's screen capture feature that way but it will work. Anyway......
enough explanation, lets get to the tutorial.
Part 2: Taking a Screen
Shot
1.
Lets take a quick look at the PSP7 "Screen Capture" options. Click
on "File" then hold the mouse over "Import" then hold
the mouse over "Screen Capture" then click on "Setup".
There are several capturing
options. Some options are obvious, like Full Screen, some are not, like
Object. Read the "Help" files or with a little practice you'll figure
them out. The other options, "Activate" and "Options", are
self explanatory.
I generally use the "Hot
Key" option to activate the screen capture but you use which ever option
you prefer. Its easiest to have the screen you want to take a screen shot
of already open before hand. When you have finished with the setup click
on the "Capture Now" button and PSP7 will minimize and what ever
screen was below it will display. If that is the screen you want to take
the screen shot of start the activation using which ever method you picked
during setup. After the capture is done PSP7 will come back up and you
will see the results of the capture.
Note: If you don't need
to make any changes to the "Screen Capture" options you can click
on "Start" instead of "Setup" or click on the camera icon
to begin a screen capture session.
Part 3: Now what?
1.
Thats really all there is to taking a screen shot. When the screen capture
opens in PSP7 you can save it in any format you want to or edit it then
save it. You might be thinking; Why would I want to take a screen shot
anyway? One obvious answer is for making tutorials like this one. For making
banners or other images that contain areas of a browser window or other
application. You can take a screen shot of your web pages to show examples
of your work, or to make thumbnail images from the screen shots.
