Screenshots with Aero effects enabled look unprofessional, largely because of the transparency effect, as the underlying colors of windows or the desktop are automatically included in the screenshot.

Take a look at two screenshots of the same window, the first with Aero enabled.

screenshots windows aero

screenshot without aero

The second screenshot was taken with the portable software Shotty, and Windows Aero enabled. An alternative to that is to change the default theme of Windows Vista or Windows 7, so that Aero is disabled. This allows the creation of screenshots without transparency and shadow effects.

But Shotty is probably the better solution for many users, who want to work with Windows Aero, but need to take screenshots without Aero effects.

Shotty comes with an installer, that offers to install the program or extract it and make it a portable application. An icon is placed in the system tray upon startup, which contains configuration settings, and links to program features.

shotty screenshot

Screenshots are created by pressing Ctrl-Print on the keyboard, or by left-clicking the system tray icon. Both can take screenshots of the full screen, or a single window, but not a custom selection.

Shotty takes high quality screenshots by default, this and the default keyboard shortcut can be changed in the program’s options.

The screenshot is displayed directly in the included (basic) image editor if the keyboard shortcut has been used to take it. The system tray icon on the other hand offers controls to directly save the screenshot, send it to the editor or to one of the supported image hosts.

shotty controls

The image editor includes several popular image editing options, including the ability to highlight or diffuse an area, add text to the screenshot, or to cut the image to keep only the selected region.

image editor

Screenshots that have been edited may be saved to the local computer, uploaded to one of the supported image hosts, or discarded. Shotty supports four different image hosts currently. There is unfortunately no option to add a custom ftp server to the upload options.

Shotty is an excellent tool to create screenshots in Windows, especially for users who regularly take screenshots but do not want Aero effects included in the shots. The download is provided at the developer’s website, the program is compatible with Windows 2000 or alter and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0, which is included in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

CmdCapture is a small command line tool that can make screenshots of the current command line. Since it is a command line tool it is driven by parameters which are explained when entering CmdCapture.exe /h.

The easiest way to create a screenshot of the command line is to run the application without parameters. It will save a screenshot in the same directory in png format with the date and time attached to the filename.

Three additional parameters are supported by the software. The parameter /f can be used to pick a custom filename and file extension. Supported are png, jpg, bmp, tif and xpm.

The /d parameter can be used to specify another directory for the created screenshots. Finally the /q parameter changes the jpg quality level which makes only sense if jpg is used as the file format.