Oct - Big Blue and Cousins

Big Blue & Cousins
www.bbc.org
Two Screen Capture Programs
by Hu Filleul
I know we have had articles in the past about how to
capture graphics from your screen but I have seen some poor
quality graphics come in with newsletter articles and this is
not necessary if you have a good Capture program. There are
two that I use, Corel Capture 9 and Snag It 6.
Corel Capture 9
This program is included with Corel Draw 9 and
is installed as a Graphics Utility along with Corel
Trace 9. You can find it by going to Corel 9 from
your start menu. Then, just follow the arrow to Graphics
Utility and then Capture 9. You can, of course, place a shortcut
icon on your desktop but I did not bother as I only use
it occasionally.
A good thing about this program is that it is fairly simple
to use. All you have to do is pay attention to the four controls
illustrated in Figure 1. There is no Help file and you don’t
need one.
Source gives you a wide range of options in selecting how
much of the screen you want to capture. I generally use the
Rectangular Area option shown in the graphic because it gives
complete control over the area to be captured.
Destination allows you to select the exact folder, and file
name where you want your capture to go. This is the control
I have the most trouble with as I tend to forget to check it
for every capture. Once you initiate the program to capture,
you can do multiple captures with the Hot Key but if you
do it just overwrites the last file name you set. I recommend
doing a separate setup for each capture.
Activation allows you to set the Hot Key and gives you
a number of default options plus User Defined. I just use the
default option F7 key and check all of the boxes.
October 2004
Image allows you to set what type of capture you want
from RGB 24-bit, through Greyscale 8-bit to Black and White
1-bit. The other most important control it gives you is setting
the resolution of the capture. Fotoprint, our printer, likes to
receive our images at a minimum of 200 dpi in order to get a
clear print. If, however, you are going to do a complete screen
capture of a RGB 24-bit image at 300 dpi, I guarantee that
you will have a huge file. It is necessary, therefore, use some
discretion about what settings you use. The menu also allows
you to set the scale of the capture upwards or downwards so
this helps in controlling file size.
Snag It 6
I
won’t write
m u c h
about this
program as the
information
below that I
captured from
their website
www.techsmith.
com pretty
much covers
its capabilities
which are much more versatile than Capture 9. If you need
this versatility, I recommend SnagIt 6 and, no doubt, ver 7.
TechSmith’s SnagIt 7.0.3 ($39.95 direct), the most expensive
of the dedicated screen-capture applications, is also the most
versatile. It can grab an area you’ve outlined in freehand with
your mouse pointer. It can scroll through a document or web site
and capture the whole thing, not just the portion that fits on your
screen. It can even grab images from DirectX apps (including PC
games) or record an AVI video of your screen movements. And if
you capture words, SnagIt converts them to editable text. All this
sound complicated? It’s not. SnagIt is remarkably intuitive and
includes plenty of tools for editing captured images.
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