Why is it essential to have a powerful
screen capture tool?

by Dr Alex  

What you see on the screen can be "captured" as an image. Why would you want to capture anything? There are three powerful reasons:

Of course, you can always press Print Screen to copy the content of the screen to the Clipboard. However, what you can see on the screen can vary so much that Print Screen is useless except for most basic capturing.

There will be instances when you will want to capture:
 
With or without the mouse cursor
 
Area, which can be in different shapes: rectangle, triangle, round-rectangle, ellipse, polygon, or freehand - in which case you simply draw to mark the area you want to capture
 
Client area (the document-only part of the application)
 
Active window
 
Window under cursor
 
Full screen
 
Object (button, toolbar with all the buttons, menu, list box, combo-box, and many others)
 
Menu under cursor
 
Mouse cursor
 
Wallpaper on your desktop

My talent for graphics art is very limited, but I do lots of illustrating for the C Point software, articles and PowerPoint presentations, and having a powerful capture tool saves heaps of my time. After searching the web, I could not find a tool that would do all I needed, and it was particularly difficult to do automated captures which are so handy for creating animations.

Once you know how much easier your work is with powerful capturing, you will be surprised how often you’ll use it. That’s why the best, most advanced capture options you won’t find anywhere else have been added to Antechinus® Animator Professional.

Even capturing small, tightly packed objects, is now very easy to do with the help of:

• Cross-hair, which allows you to draw with precision
• You can see the area magnified, and
• Coordinates are always there for precision capturing.

  

You can whip up great-looking animations in just seconds through automated captures. Animator has three mechanisms that greatly simplify this process:

1. Multiple individual captures. With this option, each time you press F11 (or some other trigger that you specify), a capture will take place.

2. Multiple automatic captures. This way, you can automatically capture anything you see on the screen as a set of images, at specified intervals.

3. Smart capture (auto-paste). You will love this option, which allows you to use Draw Magic (part of Animator) or any other drawing program you might have in place, to create an animation. Each time you copy an image of specified size to the Clipboard, Animator will automatically add it as an animation frame. You can stay in your drawing tool all the time, and just switch to the Animator in the end to save the animation.

If you ever need to illustrate software, or comment on it or analyze it, it is handy to know that programs (.exe files) and Dynamic Link Libraries (.dll files) contain resources such as images, cursors and icons. With one click you can see the entire list of resources embedded in .exe and .dll files. With another click, you can capture the resource you want.

Do you have a digital camera or a scanner? Cameras, scanners and other TWAIN-compatible devices usually came with some software to allow you to capture the images. However, images will almost always require some retouching such as color adjustments, brightness, intensity, contrast, hue, saturation, gamma and color balancing, etc. With the Animator you do three things from the same program:

Capture from scanners, digital cameras, and other TWAIN devices
Retouch images to make them perfect, and
Animate the images with a vast array of special effects.

Click here to find out more about Animator Professional