SnagIt handles the screen-grab basics with elegance and ease. It lets you choose whether to save a screen capture as a BMP, GIF, TIF, JPG, PNG, PCX, or TGA file (prompting you for a filename or automatically assigning a sequentially numbered one); put it on the Clipboard; send it to a web server or the supplied basic SnagIt Image Editor or more complex SnagIt Studio image touch-up and annotation program; or attach it to an e-mail message. SnagIt normally saves your screen grabs in a special folder in My Documents, but you can route your captures anywhere you like.
Want to show or hide the cursor, or specify a self-timer delay before snapping the picture? That's kid stuff for SnagIt. The program also lets you select anything from the active window to a single menu or object — the last indicated by a red rectangle you can move around to select different portions of a program (like the Outlook calendar below) or individual toolbars or icons. And with its ActiveX compatibility, SnagIt can normally capture the 3D games or DVD-player scenes that yield only black squares with standard screen grabbers, although SnagIt can't see visuals that rely on newer graphics cards' hardware acceleration.
For quick image background tweaks, simply drag the mouse to select a rectangle, ellipse, or other cutout shape or freehand area, and then specify the background color that appears behind rounded or irregular images. You can even apply on-the-fly filters so your captured images, menus, or whatever appear with shaded borders, altered brightness or contrast, or a reduced color palette or halftone effect — or are automatically scaled, shrinking or zooming to any percentage of actual size. For that matter, you can use SnagIt as a printer driver to capture images of how any program's printed pages would appear, headers, footers, and all.
