How To Take A Screen Shot In Windows Vista

One of the fantastic things about Windows Vista is the ability to take screen shots of whatever is currently on your screen. It’s a very handy feature and can prove very useful sometimes. Also, if you’re an avid gamer, taking screen shots during those heated action sequences during a video game can be saved, manipulated in your favourite graphics editing software, and being turned into a very unique desktop wallpaper.

To go about taking a screen shot in Windows Vista, all you need to do is press the Print Screen key - or Prnt Scrn as it appears on typical UK keyboards - and this works very similar to when you copy and paste something; When you press Print Screen, an image of your entire screen is copied to the clipboard.

Once you have successfully decided on when to take a screen shot and pressed the Print Screen key, simply boot up your favourite 2D graphics manipulation program; Whether it be: Adobe Photoshop CS3, Corel Paint Shop Pro XI, GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), or even good old fashioned Microsoft Paint which comes with virtually every Windows operating system in history. For those of you who are unfamiliar as to where Microsoft Paint is located: You can access it by clicking on your Start menu and navigating to All Programs > Accessories > Paint. I have also included a screenshot of how to reach Microsoft Paint for the newer Windows Vista users out there:

However if you want to check out one of the more professional graphics programs available, I encourage you to download and try out the free Adobe Photoshop CS 30 day trial (the latest available version at the time of writing this is Adobe Photoshop CS3) located on the official Adobe Photoshop page; You will however be required to register a free account to be eligible to download the trial version of Photoshop CS3. Although it doesn’t take five minutes to do so.

There is also a trial version of Paint Shop Pro XI available on the official Corel free software trials page.

Anyway, for this tutorial, I will be saving my screen shot in Paint Shop Pro XI. While I’m aware that a lot of users do not own a copy of Paint Shop Pro XI, the basic premise of producing and saving a screen shot is essentially the same with each and every program listed above. However, I would recommend against saving screen shots in Microsoft Paint simply because I have noticed that each and every image that I save seems to have absolutely terrible quality; Whereas both Photoshop CS3 and Paint Shop Pro XI save images with absolutely top-notch quality each and every time. And with trial versions of both programs available, you don’t really have any excuses!

So now it’s showtime. I’ll assume you’ve download and installed the Paint Shop Pro XI trial and we’ll carry on from there. Boot up Paint Shop Pro XI and provided you have attempted to copy anything else in between pressing the Print Screen key and loading up Paint Shop Pro XI, you can go straight to Edit > Paste As New Image in the upper navigation bar; Or alternatively by pressing the Ctrl + V keys simultaneously on your keyboard.

Hopefully, you will see a screen shot appear in your Paint Shop Pro XI work area. If not, simply press the Print Screen key again and go to Edit > Paste As New Image once more.

As soon as the screen shot appears you can save it by going to File > Save As… and you will be presented will the option to name and save your image.

By default the image will be called something along the lines of Image1.pspimage but please feel free to rename it to anything else you wish, like ‘My Screen Shot 1′ or something. I’d also recommend changing the file type, too. As the default Paint Shop Pro XI file type will not be a valid file to use as a Windows Vista wallpaper.

Click the drop-down box and select JPG JPEG (*.jpg, *jif, *.jpeg) from the list. The JPG file type is a widely recognized file format that will be recognized by Windows Vista as a valid image type.

Click on Save and you’re done! You have just created and saved your very own screenshot!