In the world of website design, you can’t get a way from needing to capture your screen from time to time. Sometimes you just need to copy the screen so you can open it up in photoshop and get a hex color code- other times you may want to use browser elements in your mockups. Regardless, we do it over and over, so an advanced screen capture tool is definitely in order.
If you’re fed up with Window’s “Snipping Tool”, here’s a great open source application that will rock your world- it’s called ZScreen.
ZScreen - Screen Capture Application
I haven’t exhausted the tool by any means but here’s a list of the features that I like:
1) Selection tool for grabbing just part of your screen.
This is great… and it’s not just a simple tool. The selection tool shows you your x & y coordinates, your selection width and height, tick marks for every ten pixels and a zoom view that allows you to get your selection pixel perfect.
ZScreen's Selection Tool
Sometimes it’s hard to get the selection exactly right- but with a little practice you’ll get faster. Definitely better than using the PrtScn button and cracking open photoshop.
2) Automatically save out images to your desired destination
Also a great feature! Choose where you want the screen shots to live as well as what format you’d like them in. You can configure image quality and size here as well…
Choose the image format you'd like...
Next you need to configure the location….
Choose Location
3) Keyboard shortcuts
What would all of these nice features be without quick and easy shortcut keys? I use “Crop Shot” the most- what I call the “selection tool”. Alt+z seemss like a really nice fit and I’ve never used that in any applications. This makes screen capture a breeze- in fact, 90% of the time I never have to open up photoshop. I press alt+z, use the selection tool zoom window to get the perfect selection and then I grab the PNG off my desktop… for wordpress this shaves minutes off of a photoshop tutorial and make the whole experience a lot more fun.
Keyboard Shortcuts - Captured and uploaded this image in to wordpress in under 45 seconds!
4) Quickly edit screen captures if you need to
This could come in really handy for some uses of the software. After you’ve done a screen selection, ZScreen will show a notification on the start bar that you can click. This will open the image in the default editor for the image type (you can also configure this to open it in another application).
ZScreen - Click on the notification to edit the capture
Additional Features
I’ve listed most of the features that I use in ZScreen, but there are plenty more. Here’s a few that I found noteworthy:
- Auto-upload to a server (wow, that’s nice) or a website like flickr
- Automatically add a watermark
- Freehand crop shot
- Add text automatically (haven’t used this, looks like you have to use a website text service to do it)
- Configurations for everything!
ZScreen has definitely changed the way that I do screen capturing. I love how much time it saves me!
The Link
Here’s the link:
