SnagIt is one of the more popular and easy to use software programs for screen captures in Windows environment. Originally this program started off as a screen capture programs, that is to say that it allows you to capture areas of any active screen in any application on your desktop.

What can you capture with SnagIt? You can capture images, text, video and even gather images from web sites. SnagIt has a Catalog that is a "Capture Viewer" where you can keep all your captures and browse through them.

The main interface of SnagIt is straight forward and extremely easy to use. Setting up SnagIt to capture what you want, where you want and how you want is simple.

Launch SnagIt

Setting Preferences

• Choose the 'Options' menu
• Select 'Program Preferences'
• 'In the 'hotkeys' tab, select your keys for capturing screens.

In the example above, the hot key is set to use the following keys in sequence: Ctrl+Shift+Z. You can choose to set these to any combination you wish.

• On the 'Program Preferences' window, choose the 'program options' tab. Select the option, 'Hide SnagIt before capturing'. You should have a check mark there now.
• Click the 'ok' button to close the program preferences menu

Selecting Input and Output Formats

These menu options allow you to define the input option for your screen capture. You can choose 'region' to control the size of the screen you want to capture. 'Fixed region' allows you to capture a predefined rectangle.

To get set up you choose how you want to capture. There are many choices for you to capture the screen.

The next thing to set up is what you want to happen to your captures once captured. You can set this from the Output menu. In the output area, you can select the output of your screen capture to go to a number of sources such as a file or send to a printer. If you are doing screen captures for the web, and want to save your captured image by default to a gif or jpeg format, choose the 'properties' in the output tab and choose the default file format for your files.

Check out all the options you have in the Filters menu.

Capturing Screens

Once you have your settings in place, select the image capture option, and use the hotkeys. Your mouse will turn into a hand that holds a rectangle. Hold your mouse down and drag to get the area of the screen that you want to capture. Let go of the mouse when you are done. The program will ask you for a location where you want the file saved.

Additional SnagIt Video Tutorials by TechSmith

Last updated: September 05, 2006 Copyright © 1994 - 2007 Dr. Steve Yuen. All rights reserved.