How to Take a Screenshot in Windows

Sometimes we take for granted that what may be a simple task for one may not be known by everyone else.  I was reminded of this the other day when someone at the office asked how to take a screenshot of their web browser to insert into a document.

The method for taking a screenshot depends on what you’re trying to do.  Here we cover how to take a snap of your entire desktop, one window on your desktop, and screenshots of PC games.  There’s also some software that can make this easy or even automatic.

The process of taking a screenshot consists of copying the screen to your computer’s clipboard (a temporary storage area in memory), and then pasting it into another program.

To make a screenshot of your desktop:

1. press the Print Screen key (PrtScr)
2. Open up an image editor like Microsoft Paint
3. Paste from the clipboard by selecting “Edit > Paste” or you can press Ctrl + V on your keyboard (Shift + Insert does the same thing).
4. Save the file.

Note that if you use Photoshop then you need to create a new blank document before pasting.  Photoshop will automatically make the new image the size of whatever is on your clipboard.  If you use Microsoft Paint then you may need to trim white space out of the image.

To make a screenshot of just one of your open windows:

1. Make sure the window you want to take a capture of has focus (click on it with your mouse)
2. Press Alt + PrtScr
3. Open up an image editor or Word document
4. Paste by selecting “Edit > Paste” or press Ctrl + V on your keyboard (or Shift + Insert)
5. Save the file

If you get a screenshot of your entire desktop, then you didn’t hold down the Alt key.  Note that you can paste directly into a Word document without having to save the image and then import it into the document.

We cover the Snipping Tool next, which can eliminate having to use the keyboard for screen grabs…

Windows 7 also has a neat little tool that lets you take a snapshot of any portion of your screen.  This can be very handy when you need to take a portion of a window, like getting the content of a web browser without all of the browser controls.

You can open the Snipping Tool by opening your Start Menu and looking under Accessories.  Optionally, you can find it by pressing Win + R and typing in “snippingtool.exe” or just start typing “snipping” until the program is found.  Once you find it, you might just want to copy it to your desktop or even pin it to your taskbar.

Once the Snipping Tool is open, click New and your entire desktop will be covered with a white transparent layer.  The default mode is “Rectangular Snip”.  In this mode, just drag your mouse around the area you want to capture.  You can also do a freeform capture, capture an entire window or get the full screen.

Once you lift up on your mouse button, you will see the captured area.  This is also stored in the clipboard so you can do subsequent pasting, but you can either save the image or send it to another program.

This can be really handy for those that have to take a lot of screenshots, such as testers, QA, and developers.

What about capturing an entire web page (even the stuff off the screen)?  That’s on the next page…

You can also install plugins to your web browser that lets you take a screen capture of the entire web page.

There are a few plugins for Firefox, and one of the more popular ones is Screengrab.  Unfortuntely, this program doesn’t work on the later versions of Firefox, and the Firefox browser has a habit of self-updating without asking or checking compatibility of your plugins.  So, that option is not feasible.

Since most of the OCmodshop readers are using Google Chrome, you can install a great plugin called Google Screen Capture (get the plugin here).

This plugin installs a little icon that you can use to get the whole page region, part of a page, or scroll and scrape the entire web page.  To do this, click on the Screen Capture icon, and then select “Capture Whole Page“.  You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + H.

The entire web page will be captured, which you can then save.

On the next page we show you how to take PC game screenshots automatically…

You can use traditional capture methods to take screenshots of PC games, but this can be tedious as many PC games run full-screen and you can’t just jump back and forth between an image editor and the game.  For this task you can run software to automate the procedure for you.  One of the best programs for this is FRAPS (download it here).

FRAPS automatically copies and pastes a screenshot of your game into a pre-designated folder.  You can even specify what file format to use (the free version only pastes bitmap images with the .BMP extension).

1. First install FRAPS and then run it.
2. Click on the Screenshots tab.
3. Change the folder you want all of your screenshots to appear in
4. Run your game, but leave FRAPS running in the background.  Whenever you want to take a screenshot, press F10.
5. Every time you press F10, a new screenshot file is added to the folder.

So now you are a screen-grabbing pro.  Share your knowledge with the world.  Or better yet, send them over to OCmodshop.com.