Taking a Screenshot

Taking a Screenshot
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WARNING: This article only applies to Windows PCs.  If you have a Mac or use Linux, you will need to look elsewhere for a tutorial!

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A screenshot is a picture of what is on the screen.  On a Windows PC, the act of taking a screenshot merely copies the picture to the Clipboard (see https://pastebin.com/K2T2daC5 ) - you then have to decide where to paste it.  This can be in a word-processing document (as word-processors often allow pictures to be placed alongside the text) or in an image editing program in order to save the picture simply as a picture.


Taking a Screenshot
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1. Set up the screen to be how you want it to appear in the picture.  This could mean opening a program that you want a picture of or showing a particular webpage.

2. Locate on your keyboard the key marked with the phrase "Print Screen" or the abbreviation "PrtScr" (or some variation thereupon).  Depending on your keyboard, it may also include the abbreviation "SysRq" - you can safely ignore this other function of the key.  Many keyboards place this key to the right of the F12 key, but its location may vary.

3. Press (and release) the key.

4. If you have not done so already, open the program that you wish to place the picture into.  If you wish to save it as an image file, open an image editor (such as Microsoft Paint, ImageMagick Display, GNUPaint, Adobe Photoshop, GIMP or others, depending on what is available on your system).

5. Paste the picture into the program (see https://pastebin.com/K2T2daC5 ).

6. If you have pasted the picture into an image editor, you can now edit it (maybe to crop out the bits of the picture you don't want and just leaving the window or part of a window that you do want).

7. If you have pasted the picture into an image editor in order to save the picture to a file, save the picture now.  In the "File Type" box, select "PNG" (Portable Network Graphics) - this provides the most efficient image formatting for this purpose as it retains all the information in the image while making the resulting file as small as possible.  The file type that is preset on many simple image editors is a "Windows Bitmap" - a "BMP" file.  These retain all the information but store it very inefficiently and thus the resulting file is very large.  If possible, you should use a "PNG" instead of a "BMP", but some older computers don't support "PNG"s.  Do not be tempted to save screenshots as "JPEG"s (or "JFIF"s) as this format sacrifices picture quality for a smaller file size and, while fine for a photograph, may lose too much detail for a screenshot!

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Hopefully this article will help you save pictures of things in the form that they appear.