Capturing Screenshots

Image Editor

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Capturing Screenshots

Capture Region

Keyboard Shortcut: PrtScr


The region capture mode allows you to select a rectangular region of your screen to capture.

After starting region mode, you will see a crosshair pointing out the mouse position on the screen. Click and hold where you want one of the corners of your screenshot to be. Still holding down the mouse button, drag the mouse to define the rectangle to be shot. When the green rectangle covers the area you want to be captured in your screenshot, release the mouse button. You can use the Space key to switch between region and window mode.


Holding down the Shift key while capturing fixes one dimension of the selection rectangle.  If you want to capture an exact area, you can use the Arrow keys to adjust the mouse cursor position one pixel at a time, or 10 pixels at a time by holding down the Ctrl key.  Hit Return to apply the start/end position of the selected region. You can toggle the magnifying glass by hitting Z.

 

Capture Last Region

Keyboard Shortcut: Shift + PrtScr


If you did a region or window capture before, you can capture the same region again using this option.

 

Capture Window

Keyboard Shortcut: Alt + PrtScr


Creates a screenshot of the window which is currently active.

The settings dialog offers an option not to capture the active window right away, but allowing you to select one interactively. If this option is selected, you may select a window by clicking it (As in region mode, Greenshot will highlight the area that will be captured).


If you want a child window to be captured (e.g. a browser viewport without toolbars, or a single frame of a web page using framesets) point the mouse cursor to the window and hit the PgDown key. After doing so, you can select child elements of the window to be captured. Capturing context menus on their own is different: using the "Capture window" shortcut would make the context menu disappear, and obviously the same would happen if you used Greenshot's context menu in order to create the screenshot. If you want to capture a context menu you have just brought up by right-clicking anything, simply activate region mode and then press Space.

 

Capture Full Screen

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl + PrtScr


Captures the entire active screen. This will only capture one monitor at a time.

 

Image Editor

 

Greenshot comes with an easy-to-use image editor, providing a handy feature set to add annotations or shapes to a screenshot. It even allows to highlight or obfuscate parts of your screenshot.


Greenshot's image editor is not limited to screen captures; you can also open images for editing from a file or from the clipboard. Simply right click the Greenshot icon in the notification area and select Open image from file or Open image from clipboard, respectively.


By default, the image editor will be opened whenever a screenshot is captured. If you do not want to use the image editor, you can disable this behavior in the settings.

If one or more editor windows are already open and Greenshot is configured to open the destination picker for new screenshots, you can briefly hover the mouse cursor over the entry Open in image editor to reveal a list of all open editor windows to choose from. The new screenshot will be inserted as separate object into the selected editor.

 

Drawing Shapes

Select one of the shape drawing tools from the toolbar on the left hand side of the image editor or from the Object menu. There is also a key assigned to each tool for your convenience.
Available shapes are: rectangle R, ellipse E, line L, arrow A and freehand line F.

Click, hold down the mouse button and drag to define position and size of the shape. Release the mouse button when you are done. You can move or resize existing shapes after selecting the selection tool ESC from the toolbar. The elements can also be moved by using the Arrow keys, also in combination with the Shift key. 


For every element type there is a specific set of options available to change the look of the element (e.g. line thickness, line color, fill color). You can change the options for an existing element after  selecting it, but also for the next element to be drawn after selecting a drawing tool.


You can select multiple elements for editing or positioning at a time. In order to select multiple elements, hold down the Shift key while clicking the elements.


If you want to draw equilateral shapes (e.g. force a rectangle to be a square) hold down Shift while drawing. When drawing lines or arrows, holding down Shift results in the line's angle being rounded 15°.

You can also use Shift if you want to resize an existing object maintaining it's aspect ratio. When drawing or scaling, you can hold down Ctrl to have the object anchored in it's geometrical middle. I.e. the object is resized in the opposite direction, too. (This is very handy if you want to draw an ellipse around something on your screenshot.)

 

Adding Text

Usage of the text tool T is similar to the usage of the shape tools. Just draw the text element to the desired size, then type in the text. Double click an existing text element to edit the text.

 Hit Return or Enter when you have finished editing. If you need to insert line breaks within a text box, hit Shift + Return or Shift + Enter. Ctrl + Backspace delete the previous word, Ctrl + A selects to complete text.

 

Highlighting Things

After selecting the highlight tool H, you can define the area to be highlighted exactly like you would draw a shape.

There are several options for highlighting, which you can choose from by clicking the leftmost button in the toolbar on top:

  • Highlight text: highlights an area by applying a bright color to it, like
     an office text highlighter
  • Highlight area: blurs* and darkens everything outside the selected area
  • Grayscale: everything outside the selected area will be turned to grayscale
  • Magnify: the selected area will be displayed magnified

 

Obfuscating Things

Obfuscating parts of a screenshot is a good idea if it contains data which is not intended for other people to see, e.g. bank account data, names, passwords or faces on images.
Use the obfuscate tool O exactly like the highlight tool. Available options for obfuscation are:

  • Pixelize: increases the pixel size for the selected area
  • Blur*: blurs the selected area

* Depending on the performance of your computer, applying a blur effect might slow down Greenshot's image editor. If you feel the image editor reacting slowly as soon as a blur is applied, try reducing the value for Preview quality in the toolbar or decrease the value for Blur radius.

If the blur performance is still too bad for you to work with, you might prefer to use the pixelize effect instead.

 

Cropping

If you only need a part of the screenshot you have captured, use the crop tool (C) to crop it to the desired area.

After selecting the crop tool, draw a rectangle for the area of the screenshot you want to keep. You can resize the selected area like any other element.

When you are content with your selection, use the confirm button in the toolbar or hit the Enter or the Return key. You can cancel cropping by clicking the cancel button or hitting ESC.  Ctrl + - immediately crops the area to match all existing elements.


Auto-Crop: If you need to crop a border of solid background color from your screenshot, simply choose Auto-Crop from the Edit menu and Greenshot will automatically select the area for cropping.

 

Enlarging

In order to enlarge the screenshot, hit Shift + “+”, which will add 25 pixels to all four sides.

 

Adding Graphics

You can simply add graphics or images to your screenshot by dragging and dropping an image file into the editor window. You can also insert screenshots of other windows by selecting Insert window from the Edit menu. A list of all open windows appears, allowing you to select one for insertion. Insert an image from the clipboard by Ctrl + v works as well.

 

Re-Use Drawn elements

If you find yourself using the same or similar elements on most of your screenshots (e.g. a text field containing browser type and version, or obfuscating the same element on several screenshots) you can re-use elements.

Select Save objects to file from the Object menu to save the current set of elements for re-using it later. Load objects from file applies the same elements to another screenshot.

 

Exporting/Output Settings

 

After editing the screenshot, you can export the result for different purposes, depending on your needs. You can access all export options through the File menu, the topmost toolbar or via shortcuts:

  • Save Control + S: saves the image to a file (if the image has already been saved, else displays Save as... dialog)
  • Save as... Control + Shift + S: lets you choose location, filename and image format for the file to save
  • Copy image to clipboard Control + Shift + C: puts a copy of the image into the clipboard, allowing to paste into other programs
  • Print... Control + P: sends the image to a printer
  • E-Mail Control + E: opens a new message in your default e-mail client, adding the image as attachment

After saving an image from the editor, right-click the status bar at the bottom of the editor window to either copy the file path into the clipboard or open the containing directory in Windows Explorer.

 

Export

Output Settings

  • Shrink printout to fit paper size: If the image would exceed paper size, it will be shrinked to fit on the page.
  • Enlarge printout to fit paper size: If the image is smaller than the paper size, it will be scaled to be printed as large as possible without exceeding paper size.
  • Rotate printout to page orientation: Will rotate a landscape format image by 90° for printing.
  • Print with inverted colors: Will invert the screenshot before printing it, useful e.g. when printing a screenshot of white text on black background (to save toner/ink).

 

Print Settings

  • Shrink printout to fit paper size: If the image would exceed paper size, it will be shrinked to fit on the page.
  • Enlarge printout to fit paper size: If the image is smaller than the paper size, it will be scaled to be printed as large as possible without exceeding paper size.
  • Rotate printout to page orientation: Will rotate a landscape format image by 90° for printing.
  • Print with inverted colors: Will invert the screenshot before printing it, useful e.g. when printing a screenshot of white text on black background (to save toner/ink).