How to use Greenshot

How to use Greenshot

Taking your screenshot

Press the Print Screen button on your keyboard to start the screen capture. If you don't know where it is, the key can be found as labeled on most desktop keyboards.



The Print Screen button's location may vary on a laptop keyboard, however. An example is shown below.



If you can't find it, look on your keyboard for any key labeled Print Screen, PrtScr, or something similar. If it's written in blue text, you probably need to hold down the Fn key to use the Print Screen function instead of its normal one. For example, in the picture above pressing Fn and the right arrow key will result in an End command.

Once you've pressed the key, you should see something like the picture below.



The crosshair and green line show where your cursor is. The circle to the bottom-right of the crosshair shows a magnified view of the area around your cursor. The numbers in the green box show the coordinates of your cursor; 0 x 0 is the top-left of your monitor.

If you want to fine-tune your selection, you can use the arrow keys to move your cursor pixel by pixel.

Hold down the left mouse button and drag your mouse over the area you want to capture. Everything in the green box will be captured.



This will open the save dialog, if you have Greenshot set to do so.
The first option will ask you where you want to save the file.
The second option will save it to the location you have selected in Greenshot's settings.
The third option will let you edit the image, allowing you to insert annotations such as the red boxes I used to highlight the Print Screen keys earlier in the tutorial. This will be covered in the next section.
The fourth option copies the image to your clipboard, letting you paste the image into most programs. (It's how I've been inserting images into this tutorial.)
The various other options push the image to your printer or various programs. Feel free to experiment with these options as well, if you so desire.
The final option uploads the image to Imgur, a free image hosting site. Once uploaded, a link to the resulting image will be copied to your clipboard.
Or if you decide you don't like the image you took, you can click the Close option to close the dialogue and not save the image at all.



The editor



The tools you can use to annotate your image are located on the left. You can hover your cursor over a tool to see its name.
The Rectangle, Circle, Line, Arrow, and Freehand tools let you add the appropriate shapes to your image in order to highlight certain things. Like selecting the area of the image itself, you use these by clicking and dragging.
The Text and Speech Bubble tools let you insert comments. Once again, you add these by clicking and dragging the area you want to edit. Once you have your selection, type the text you want.
The Counter tool is good for listing steps. Clicking on the image will add a ① to your image. Clicking again will add a ②, and so on.
The Highlight and Obfuscate tools do exactly what they say. They're prefect for when you want to draw attention to or away from something in your image.
The Effects tools are neat if you want to add a bit of visual flair to your image, but I don't see too much use for them myself.
Finally, we have the Crop, Rotate, and Resize tools. These are rather self-explanatory.
If you're unsure how to use any of these tools, feel free to experiment with them.



Along the top we have some more icons. These mostly do things you can find in the save dialog, but do note the Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, and Redo commands. These are extremely handy for managing the edits you've made to your image. Also note the Help option represented by the ? which will open this help page.

More options

Greenshot lives in the notification area of your Taskbar, as shown in the below screenshot.



Right-click on the Greenshot icon to bring up the menu shown below. The various Capture tasks can be bound to the key(s) of your choice via the Preferences... option. Most of the other options in this menu should be mostly self-explanatory, aside from the "Configure external commands" option which is outside the scope of this tutorial.



Lastly, we have the Preferences window. There's a lot of settings to choose, but most of them don't need to be changed from the defaults. I'll be going over the Hotkeys section.



Here is where you can set your hotkeys for Greenshot. Click into the appropriate field and press the key combo you'd like to use. For instance, if you want to set "Capture window" to activate with Ctrl + Print Screen, click its field, hold Ctrl, and press Print Screen. Pressing Delete or Backspace in the field will clear its binding.

Once you're comfortable with your bindings, click Ok to finalize your changes or click Cancel to ignore them.

If anything in this tutorial was unclear or if you have questions, please email it-amc@alamedamortgage.com