How To Do a Screen Capture

When you are having a difficult time getting something to work, I may have a hard time helping you unless I know what you have typed into the dialog boxes that you use to create your pages. Often, an image of those dialog boxes will help me pinpoint the causes of your problems more quickly. This is especially true if you are having problems with the site setup. Here is how you create screen captures:

Windows OS

You can print a picture of your screen to the clipboard on Windows by hitting the PrintScreen (Prnt Scrn or similar) key on your keyboard. If you hold down the Alt key while hitting the PrintScreen key, you will just get the active window, instead of the entire screen.

Once the image is on the clipboard, you can paste it into another program. I always use an image editing program like Photoshop. When you have an image on the clipboard and then open an new file in either one of those programs, they will open a new file that is exactly the same size as the image on your clipboard. Very handy.

Once the blank new file is opened, paste the screen capture from your clipboard into the new file. It fits perfectly. You may wish to crop the image so that just the important parts show. Save the image as a .jpg or .png file.

Macintosh OS

To get a screen capture on the Mac OS 10, you need to:

Open "Grab". It's a program listed in the Utilities folder, which is inside the Applications folder.
From the menu bar choose Capture -> Selection.
Now move the pointer to a corner of the area that you wish to capture.
Drag the pointer across the area that you want to capture and then release the mouse button.
A new window will open with an image of the captured computer screen. You now have a number of different options. You can
1. Go to File -> Save and save the image file. It will be saved in the .tif format. After you save it, you can open it in an image editing program or in the Preview application and convert it to a .gif or a .jpg file for use on the Web. Use File - Save As.
2. You can choose Edit -> Copy to copy the image to the clipboard. Then you can open your image editing program such as Fireworks or Photoshop and go to File -> New. When the new file opens, you can use Edit -> Paste to paste the image into the document window. Save the image and then go on to the next section.

Optimizing the Image - for both Mac and Windows Users

After obtaining the image, users on both the Windows and Mac platforms need to optimize the image for Web delivery. First get rid of the unnecessary areas by cropping the image, if your capture shows more than we need to see. Now you are ready to compress the image into .gif or .jpg format.

In Photoshop, choose File ->Export ->Save for Web. Adjust the settings and choose OK. Use either the .jpg or .png compression.

Attach the Image to Your Discussion Board Message

Now, you should have a nice .gif or .jpg to attach to your discussion board message. When you post your message, click the attach button under the text area where you insert the message. Browse to the .png or .jpg file and select it as the attachment.

Be Sure That You Can Read the Text

Please be sure that you can read the text in your screen captures. Using Word or a PDF rather than an image editing program often makes the text in the screen captures too small to read. If you don't have an image editing program, you can download a trial version of Photoshop that will last for 30 days. You can also download one of the free or low cost image editing programs that are available. Check the "Software" page.