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Come fare screenshot PC
Take a screenshot on Windows 10 it is very simple and within everyone’s reach, but those who work with captured images (a blog or an information site) need more complex tools to capture parts of the screen and modify them if necessary. So let’s see what a screenshot is, the simple methods that everyone can use, and the advanced methods, intended for professionals in the sector.
What is a screenshot?
As also guessed from the introduction screenshots are the saved screen images computer, i.e. a snapshot, a still image taken to save a desktop screen, a website, a game moment, a frame of a video, etc.
Personally, I use screenshots a lot when I have to put a small image on blog articles, saving a piece of the reviewed program window, the logo, or a web page. Those who make illustrated program guides use screenshots to visually show what is being explained.
Screenshots can also be very useful to show the problem to a technical friend or to show the use of a program in a chat or in an online workgroup, who can then check if the program in use is the same on his computer.
Take screenshots from the keyboard
The quickest way to take a screenshot and save screen images provides the pressure of tasto Stamp – R Sist (The Print Screen) on the keyboard.
On notebooks, you may need to press and hold the function key (FN) in combination with the key Stamp in order to make the screenshot. Also from the keyboard, we can press the combination Alt+Stamp per take the screenshot of the active window only. This is very useful if you want to save time on making clippings. Below we can find other methods to capture the screenshot:
- In Windows 10 we can also press the key combination Windows+Stamp, per automatically save the screen photo in a folder called “Screenshot” located inside the folder Images.
- Still in Windows 10 by pressing the keys Shift + Windows + S We can select the area to save as a screenshot.
Some methods do not allow you to immediately save the file in the image folder, and for many, it is difficult to understand what happened to the screenshot since there is no acoustic or visual feedback. The image captured via the Print key is copied to the Windows clipboard. The clipboard or clipboard is the hidden area of Windows where the copy and paste data is saved (as also seen in the guide view copied text and copy and paste clipboard).
In order to save the screenshot we can open the programma Paint (which can be called up from the Start menu at the bottom left) and, once opened, press CTRL + V on the keyboard or open the Paste icon at the top to paste the screenshot; to save the image we have to do is press the top on the File menu and select Save with name. However, the best program to import screenshots to edit is not Paint but IrfanView. IrfanView is an image manager complete with plugins and allows you to view, crop, resize files, even more than one simultaneously.
In addition to Paint and IrfanView, we can also paste the screen image into Word, Excel, or any other program that supports the integration of images in the text or in the window, such as the GIMP photo editing program.
Tools built into Windows 10
In Windows 10 we can use some integrated tools to make quality screenshots, without necessarily having to download new programs from the Internet. The first tool we can use is the Snipping Tool, which we can call up from the search bar or from the Start menu at the bottom left.
This tool has been present since Windows 7 and allows you to capture a portion of the screen, an active window, or even the entire PC screen, also setting a delay in the capture (to be able to capture contextual menus or windows that cannot be recalled later).
On Windows 10 we also find a newer tool to be able to take screenshots: Capture and Annotate, which can be called up both from the Start menu at the bottom left and using the keyboard shortcuts seen in the previous chapter.
In addition to capturing parts of the screen or active windows (but we can also capture the whole screen), this tool allows you to modify the captured image, adding notes, arrows, numbers, letters, blackout filters, and so on, so as to be able to make professional screenshots.
We talked about these tools in the guide on how to photograph the PC screen
Programs for taking screenshots
If the tools built into Windows 10 are too simple and limited for our purposes, we can always download external programs to capture PC screenshots. There are so many, but the best is without a doubt ShareX, downloadable for free from the official website.
With this program, we can remap the STAMP keys or create custom shortcuts to capture the screen, automate the capture of the active window, automatically upload photos to an external site (dedicated to saving photos as Imgur), choose whether to immediately save the copy of the photo or open the internal editor, so you can add arrows, directions, numbers, letters or obfuscate sensitive information.
Currently, it is the best program to make screenshots on PC, but it requires a minimum of configuration to be used: it is, therefore, convenient to use it only if we use screenshots a lot for work.
Another program that we can use to take a screenshot in Windows 10 is Greenshot, available for free download from the official website.
This program is much easier to use and configure than ShareX; it is placed in the system bar at the bottom right and allows you to quickly capture a selected area, a window, or even the entire screen and, thanks to the contextual menu, you can choose from time to time whether to save the image, whether to modify it with the internal editor, whether to upload it to Dropbox or whether to send it to a photo editing program such as Paint.NET.
Conclusions
Making screenshots on Windows is very simple and we can both use the keyboard shortcuts and the tools integrated into the system, so as to always have maximum control over the screenshots to be taken for a guide or for a personal blog article. For those who often work with screenshots, we recommend trying ShareX and Greenshot, two free and open-source programs that can do the job well.
Still, on the subject of screenshots, we can also capture web pages using the extensions for Chrome and Firefox to capture wallpapers and images from websites.
If, on the other hand, we want to photograph the screen of our Android smartphone, we invite you to read our guide Photographing the screen on Android (Samsung, Xiaomi, and Huawei).