Product Reviews

Capturing screenshots might not be glamorous, but it forms a major part of your life if you produce software manuals or training materials. In fact, it soon becomes a chore, and that's when you need dedicated help from something like TechSmith SnagIt 6.2.

Setting up your capture in the main SnagIt window is straightforward. First, you need to set the Input. Normally, you'd set this to Window, Active Window, Object, Menu, Region or Fixed Region, but SnagIt also provides advanced options such as Triangle, Rounded Rectangle and DirectX. You can also fine-tune the effect for the major options to capture cascading menus complete with their menu bar, include the cursor or even autoscroll to capture web pages or documents that are too large for a single screen. Another welcome feature is the ability to save common setups as named profiles.

Setting up your Output offers similar control. The most common choice will be to save directly to a specified file format such as PNG, TIFF, JPEG or GIF, and there are also preferences to set the compression, directory and automatic naming. Other options include automatically copying the capture to the clipboard, printer, your email program or even to a web address. You can also choose to automatically copy your file to SnagIt's thumbnail-based Catalog program. It's basic, but it allows you to batch-convert and process multiple files.

The third and final stage of SnagIt's three-part setup is the Filters

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menu, where you set any processing to be applied to your capture. The most likely option is to reduce the colours, in which case you can set the dithering and how the palette is generated. You're also able to automatically substitute colours and change the image's hue, brightness, contrast, saturation and gamma. There are even options to scale, crop and change the resolution, and you can automatically add watermarks, borders and captions too.

Adding captions, such as the date, automatically makes sense, but often you'll want to annotate the capture yourself to highlight a particular feature. SnagIt provides a dedicated application called SnagIt Studio for precisely this purpose. You can draw on-screen or add text or predefined shapes such as arrows, pointers or stamps. Since these elements are all stored as vector information, the underlying bitmap is unaffected and everything remains fully editable.

So far we've been talking about simple screen-image capture, but SnagIt also offers four useful variations on the theme. Text Capture copies any data on-screen as editable text - useful for generating file lists from Windows Explorer. Printer Capture can redirect printer output to a bitmap file; Web Capture pulls all graphics from an URL; and Video Capture captures all screen activity to an AVI.

There's one fly in the ointment, though, which is the SnagIt Capture Preview. This lets you check your image straight after capture, but it can only handle one image at a time and doesn't allow you to preview the effect of colour-reduction changes on-screen. Until this changes, stick with your current screen-capture program, but for plenty of users (TechSmith claims seven million) SnagIt's many strengths easily outweigh these small disappointments.

However, if you're planning to use SnagIt for training materials, check out TechSmith's more powerful Camtasia Studio. Other benefits include the new add-ins for Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, Word and FrameMaker, which provide instant access to SnagIt's features.