Faststone Screen Capture Program Review
Considering the amount of screen captures I put on my blog you will agree that I do need one that makes me really productive which is exactly what FastStone Screen Capture program is.
The most surprising is its main interface. Its one of the simplest and inconspicuous looking interfaces I have ever seen.
Among the multitude of features it provides 3 are worthy of note.
1. Intelligent Selection
Take a look at the following snapshot. (One of my moments with Microsoft Hearts. Only a true Hearts player can grasp the beauty of this snapshot. 
)
All it took me to take this snapshot is one click. If you had the need to take such a snapshot then you might have to do a lot of clippings to achieve this and still the result won’t be this good.
To activate the intelligent selection feature click on 
in the main window. As you move the cursor across screen the intelligent selection feature highlights the screen objects that can be captured which looks like this.
Note how the corresponding screen object near the cursor is highlighted. Once it highlights the screen object that you want to capture then press left click to capture or right click to cancel the process.
2. Capture Scrolling Window
This feature is useful when part of capture area can only be access by window scrolling. The beauty of this feature is it works on almost all the apps that has a scrollbar. This feature was useful to me when I need to take snapshot of my web page in Safari Web Browser since Safari renders fonts very smoothly. Take a look at the following snapshot taken is Safari. (click to see larger image)
To activate this feature click 
in the main window and move the cursor to the scrollbar window that needs to captured. Once its highlighted then press left click to capture or right click to cancel the process.
Note:
- Horizontal scrolling is not supported.
- This feature uses the actual mouse scroll to achieve this effect. Make sure the place the cursor is placed in such a way that it doesn’t overlap with an internal page scrollbar e.g., youtube.
3. Styling and Watermarking
The captured snapshot is then placed in FastStone Editor where you can add some styles. This is the snapshot of FastStone Editor. (click to see larger image)
Click on the Edge button on the toolbar. You should see following dialog. (click to see larger image)
Check/UnCheck the effects that you want to be applied then press Apply button to apply the effects on the image.
For Watermarking to work, the image should be transparent with text on it. You can use Gimp or similar image editor to get the watermark image. You can also preconfigure what effects need to be applied once a snapshot is taken. To enable this option goto FastStone Capture (main window) > 
> Edge/Watermark. Then enable checkbox Use Edge/Watermark Effects Automatically.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Review, Screen Capture, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.