Is it possible to take a picture of what’s on my monitor, so that I can save it or send it to someone?
Yes it is! These are called “screenshots” and it’s a very simple thing to do.
Taking Screenshots in Windows
There’s only one step to taking a screenshot in Windows: locate the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard and press it. Once pressed, an image of what’s on your screen will be saved to your clipboard. You can also restrict the print screen function to only capturing an image of the current active window by holding the Alt key while you press Print Screen. To save this image, open up MS Paint, click “Edit” and then click “Paste”. Your screenshot is now ready to be saved, with one small modification: after you click File > Save and the Save window pops up, locate the “Save As Type” box at the bottom of the screen and change it to jpeg. Alternatively, you can paste the screenshot into a Word document instead of Paint.
Taking Screenshots in Mac OS X
Taking a screenshot of your desktop in Mac OS X is a little more stressful on the fingers: hold Cmd + Shift + 4, press the spacebar, then click on the window whose screenshot you want to capture. The image will save to your desktop as a PDF file.
If you want to take a screenshot of your entire OS X desktop, you’ll need to use the Grab utility.
A note about image formats
Since most computer users associate jpegs with digital images, I have used jpeg as the primary example for saving a screenshot in a format that other people will be able to see on their computers. One reader writes to us with a better alternative when it comes to saving screenshots:
“… you write that the image should be saved in MS Paint as JPEG. I, and a few others according to the web, disagree, since JPEG loses a lot of information about sharp edges, for example. Typically most of the screenshots have a lot of sharp edges and big contrast differences, so the best alternative would be size- and quality-wise PNG.”
He cites the article “When and how to use Internet image formats“, which explains the differences between many image formats in clear and concise detail. It also gives you some guidelines for when to choose which image format. Besides JPEG and PNG, most of the other formats mentioned are available in the “Save As Type:” drop down box in MS Paint and any other graphics program.
