It supports two video modes which can both capture the entire screen, a program window or a custom region defined by the user of the program. Both modes support microphone input.

The difference between the two modes is that one has been specifically designed for program demonstrations and user instructions. This mode captures everything on screen including mouse movements.

The screenshot taking capabilities leave nothing to desire, supporting full screen, window, custom rectangle, freestyle shapes and scrolling window grabs.

free screen capture software

Snap 3 places a hidden toolbar at the top of the screen by default. The toolbar becomes visible on mouse over so that the different screen capturing options can be selected.

Experienced users might prefer the keyboard shortcuts instead which speed up the process of taking screenshots and videos. The toolbar can be disabled so that it is not triggered accidentally which can be problematic when full screen applications are running. The system tray icon offers a third possibility to access the program’s functionality.

The settings can be used to make configuration changes like removing the toolbar from the desktop. Here it is possible to change keyboard shortcuts, output formats and locations or the position of the capture bar.

screen capture software

A fullscreen editor is opened after a capture. The editor contains basic image editing options like adding text or arrows to the screenshot, highlighting areas, rotating, zooming, resizing and adding effects. Various processing options are available as well, it is for instance possible to send the screenshot per email, print it or save it to a local directory.

Video captures basically work the same way as image captures. Options are available to create a video of a window, desktop, rectangular region or fixed region.

video capture

Snap 3 leaves little to desired when it comes to taking screenshots. The only two aspects that are missing are the ability to save screenshots directly without opening the image editor first and the availability of additional video formats that the video captures can be saved in.

How To Get The Free Copy Of Snap 3

Visit the promotional page to receive a free key of Ashampoo Snap 3. Just enter a valid email address and click Send. The first email that will be send to the email account is a confirmation email with a link that needs to be opened in a web browser.

This opens the product registration screen on the Ashampoo website. It is sufficient to simply click the OK, Send button at the bottom. Users who do not want to be part of the Ashampoo community can disable that option before they click the button.

A second email will be dispatched containing the product key for Snap 3. Snap 3.40 itself can be downloaded from Cnet. (via Techno 360)

PicPick is available as a portable version and an installer. The capture software places its icon in the Windows task bar after startup. The user can then make use of the functionality by clicking on that icon or by using one of the freely configurable hotkeys to do so. The screen capturing options include full screen captures (with multi-monitor support), active windows captures, window controlled, fixed region and free hand captures.

The screen capture is then displayed in the program’s interface which offers basic image editing features that include crop, resize and rotate options, basic image editing tools like adding text, basic geometric shapes, a color picker and magnifier.

The memory consumption is lower than 10 Megabytes of computer memory which is acceptable for such a program. The screen capture capabilities combined with the imaged editor make PicPick a potent screen capturing program. The program can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

It adds itself as a toolbar button which can be used to trigger the screen capturing process. It is possible to capture the visible area of the browser window or the entire website. This leads to another menu with options to edit, save, print, upload or email the captured area. It is furthermore possible to open the output directly in an external image editor.

Fireshot comes with a basic editor if the edit option has been selected. This opens the screen capture in a new window that contains a preview and buttons in an header area. It is possible to add text or images, highlight areas, add annotations or pointers to the screen capture.

Every option can be customized. The font, size, alignment and typographic elements like bold, underline or italic can be customized for example when adding text to the screen capture. It is then possible to use the same export options that are available directly from the Fireshot button.

Fireshot could be an interesting screen capture software for users who only need to take screen captures of websites. The only negative aspect is that the edit window of the free version of Fireshot blocks the web browser window. Firefox for Internet Explorer and Firefox can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

It can be somewhat cumbersome to capture a screenshot in Grab, and then have to move it into a program like Photoshop to manipulate it. And if you want to share the image, you have to change its format.

An alternative piece of software is Skitch, screen-capturing software for OS X. Skitch provides screen-capturing facilities similar to Grub, but integrates some editing tools and also provides tools to share the images.

Skitch allows users to draw on screenshots and annotate them, through placing arrows and text. One can also make images have a transparent background, crop images, add a drop shadow to them or rotate them.

One of the cooler features is the ‘drag’ feature. When a screenshot has been captured and edited, if you click ‘drag me’, you can drag the image to a folder, an email or to open in another program.

Skitch can export images as JPEGs, PNGs, PDFs, SVGs, TIFFs, GIFs and JPGs. It can also upload images to Flickr, FTP servers, WebDAV folders and skitch.com, their own image hosting service.

The software boasts many features and I find it much better to use than Grab, as there’s no need to have to use other pieces of software.

Users who never worked with screen capture software before will be able to start a capturing process in less than a minute as the software program has been designed with ease of use in mind. It takes for example only a click with the mouse button to start the first screen capturing process after installation. The program comes with a few options that change and tune certain aspects of the screen capturing.

It is for example possible to record audio narration (with a connected microphone) or webcam video (with a connected webcam) together in the process. The screen capture software would combine these automatically during the capturing process.

Other available options include the selection of the sound device and webcam if multiple devices are connected to the computer system. It is furthermore possible to set the frame rate of the recording. Available framerates are 5, 10 and 15 frames per second.

Webinaria will display the recording after the screen capturing process has been ended by the user. It is possible to view the recording frame by frame, delete sections and to publish it at the Webinaria website. The recording itself can be saved as an avi or flv video file on the computer system.

Alternatives are the screen capture software Wegame, the online desktop recorder ScreenToaster, Jing, Debut video capturing software and Camtasia Studio.

It requires the creation or existence of a (free) WeGame account but that is the only nuisance in the process. The videos and screenshots that can be produced with the screen capture software are stored on the local hard drive and only uploaded to the WeGame portal if the user selects to do so. (Automatic screenshot upload can be disabled in the options).

Two hotkeys are defined for the video recording and screenshot creation. The quality of the video recording can be changed from web recording to high quality recording if the computer meets the requirements.

A green square in the left corner indicates that the screen capture software is ready to record. The hotkey will start the video recording or screenshot creation. Pressing the hotkey again will stop the video recording.

The high definition videos were recorded as avi files in a resolution of 1024×768, a bitrate of 12290 Kbps and an audio stream bitrate of 1411 Kbps. WeGame will automatically convert the video into that format even if the game resolution is larger than that. 30 seconds of recording take up about 70 Megabytes of hard drive space. There was no visual impact on game performance while recording the game videos.

Screenshot Captor by Donation Coder Mouser is another screen capture software and it feels like comparing Wordpad with Microsoft Office Word. Screenshot Captor was recently released in a new version and it provides functions that many users will find attractive and useful.

It obviously supports capturing various parts of the computer screen like program windows, selected regions, fixed sized regions, the entire screen but also scrolling windows and objects which is one of the additions in the new version.

The screen capture software can be managed from the program’s interface or by using hotkeys – which can be changed to preferred key combinations – to speed up the screen capturing process. The process of capturing a screenshot is not slower than capturing a screenshot with MWSnap.

Screenshot Captor shines when it comes to processing a captured screen. MWSnap was only able to save it in various formats while Mouser’s software can add elements to the screen before saving it. It is nevertheless possible to simply save it and use it that way. Users who like to add text, images or objects to screenshots on the other hand will find all the tools they need to do just that.

By default Screenshot Captor displays a small dialog after taking a screenshot that can be used to print or save the image, copy it to the clipboard or create a thumbnail of it plus various other possibilities. That dialog can be disabled in the program’s options but it is quite useful for those users who want to take a screenshot and save it right away with processing it further.

Captured screenshots can be shown in the main program interface where they can be processed. The image can be resized, text can be added, sections of the screen can be highlighted and objects added.

Previous screenshots are shown in the capturing history which provides a fast way of accessing them from the program’s interface. Another interesting option is the support for third party tools. It is easy to integrate them in Screenshot Captor and use them to process the images further.

The homepage links to a few additional tools that can be integrated like a color chooser to discover the exact color of a pixel of the screenshot.

The screen capture software should be the right application for anyone who takes screenshots regularly. Users who process their screenshots afterwards will find all the tools they need to do just that without the need to install an image editor to do so.

Update: Screenshot Captor 3 has been released. I suggest you check out the review linked above to find out what’s new. Among the new features are automatic screenshot uploading options, Windows 7 window transparency support and the best scrolling window capturing options that you find in a screen capturing software.