gHacks technology news » image-capture http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Screen Capture Tool Greenshot http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/07/screen-capture-tool-greenshot/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/07/screen-capture-tool-greenshot/#comments Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:15:51 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=11762 One of the easiest way of taking a screenshot is by pressing the Print key which will send a screenshot of the desktop to the Clipboard from where it can be processed further. Screen capture tools like Greenshot or the previously reviewed MWSnap add interesting new options to the screen capturing process.

Greenshot, a screen capturing tool for the Windows operating system, does not only offer to take a screenshot of the desktop but also of a selected window or custom rectangle. The results can be send to the default image editor, saved as a jpg file to the computer, printed on a connected printer or added to the clipboard. One of the interesting aspects of Greenshot is that several of the processing ways can be selected. A user could copy the screenshot to the clipboard, save it in a selected image format and print it at the same time.

The print screen key will be utilized as the main hotkey for the screen capturing process. Pressing the print key will make it possible to take a screenshot of a rectangle that the user can draw on the computer screen. Pressing Alt and the print key will activate windowed mode which allows the user to take a screenshot of a window and CTRL plus the print key will take a screenshot of the full screen.

screen capture tool

Greenshot’s options contain various settings that can be used to customize the output. The user can select the image format, the filename pattern, storage location and image quality of the screenshots. There are also several print options like shrinking or enlarging screenshots automatically to fit the paper size.

Greenshot comes with its own image editor that can be used to add shapes and text to the screenshot before saving a final version to the computer system.

The screen capturing tool will remain in the system tray all the time. The only drawback is its computer memory usage of around 35 Megabytes. The previously mentioned MWSnap uses less than six Megabytes of computer memory.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/07/screen-capture-tool-greenshot/feed/ 5 MWSnap a free screen capturing software http://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/23/mwsnap-a-free-screen-capturing-software/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/23/mwsnap-a-free-screen-capturing-software/#comments Wed, 23 May 2007 03:36:20 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/23/mwsnap-a-free-screen-capturing-software/ I’m always going the extra mile when I take screenshots in Windows XP. I hit the Print button on the keyboard, open GIMP and paste the contents into a new image, cut the part of the image that I need, resize it and finally save it to be able to upload it to my ftp.

The worst part of this job is that it takes a lot of time to complete all the steps and I think I found a nice free screen capturing software with the name MWSnap which can optimize this process.

Four different ways of creating screenshots are supported by MWSnap: Fixed Rectangle, Any Rectangle, Window / Menu or Full Desktop. The Any Rectangle method is working best for my purposes.

I can draw a rectangle around the part of my screen that I want to capture, fine tune it with the cursor keys and the comfortable zoom feature, and left-click when I’m done to capture the rectangle.

mwsnap free screen capturing software

The Fixed Rectangle captures rectangles of a predefined size that you specify. This is useful if you want to take a series of captures that should all have the same size. Window and Desktop mode should be self explanatory.

Hotkeys can be used to speed it up further, CTRL + Shift + A would be a shortcut for Any Rectangle for instance. MWSnap provides the user with additional functions, a ruler and zoom function for instance that make it possible to create precise screenshots.

Images can be saved in a number of formats including jpg,gif and png with the possibility to select the quality level of the saved image.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/23/mwsnap-a-free-screen-capturing-software/feed/ 8 Capture image and convert it to text http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/12/capture-image-and-convert-it-to-text/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/12/capture-image-and-convert-it-to-text/#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2007 04:42:43 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/12/capture-image-and-convert-it-to-text/ I was not really sure how to name the title of this article. Jocr is a freeware that makes it possible to capture to capture a set region, a window or a full screen image in Windows and use character recognition to write the text of the image into a notepad file. The only prerequisite as far as I can tell is – unfortunately – a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 or newer with Microsoft Office Document Imaging installed which you can find under the Office Tools tab of the installation CD. The language that you are using has to be supported by Microsoft Office Document Imaging, about 20 are supported next to English of course.

jocr character recognitionUsing Jocr is actually a pretty straightforward process. Choose if you want to capture a region, window or desktop and use the mouse to draw the region or to highlight a window that should be captured. It is not necessary to select something if you choose to capture the whole desktop of course. A preview of the captured image will be shown in Jocr and all that is left to be done is to click on recognize to start the character recognition.

Results are actually pretty good. They are not perfect however and you need to manually edit them for errors but the recognition rate is astounding for a freeware. The main use that I can foresee for this software would be to capture text from files that can not be copied and use Jocr to have an editable version of the text.

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