JAMiAM
Posts: 6165
Joined: 2/8/2004
Status: offline
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Hi,
No worries, a question often asked. Using Windows XP, here are the steps:
1. Press your Print Screen button on the keyboard. This is usually abbreviated, like PrtScrn, and a "Shifted" key. That is, you need to hit the shift key at the same time. When you do this, it will save the image on your screen to a temporary file in the Windows Clipboard.
2. Go to your Start Menu, select All Programs >>> Accessories >>> Paint. Click on Paint to start the MS Paint program. If you do a lot of screenshots, you can also make a desktop shortcut pointing to Paint, so that you don't have to go through the Start Menu.
3. Paint will open with a blank page, or document. Simply push your Ctrl key and V key at the same time to paste the contents of the temporary file saved in step 1 onto the open document. Alternately, you can click on the Edit menu item in the top bar, then choose Paste.
4. Now, you can do some rudimentary editing of the image, putting in text, limited graphics, cropping the image, etc.
5. When you are finished manipulating your image, then select the File menu option, and then click on "Save as..." which will give you the option to name the file, and choose the type of file in the bottom dialogue boxes. Also, the directory in which the file will be saved, in the top dialogue box. By default Windows will store image type files in the My Pictures folder, within your My Documents folder.
6. When saving the file, it is very important to save it as the proper file type. If you are planning to do further manipulations of the file, then choose the default option of 24-bit Bitmap (*.bmp;*.dib). If you are finished with all manipulations, and want to upload the file somewhere, like in a forum post, then choose to save as JPEG (*.JPG;*.JPEG;*.JPE;*.JFIF). The former type, the .BMP will take up a lot of storage space and the file size will be too large to upload to most forums. The latter type is a compressed file format and will suffer a mild degradation of quality, but will take up much less space. The image degradation is why you should generally not continue to manipulate a JPEG image file as with each iteration, it will suffer further degradation, upon saving to a JPEG.
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Quick help needed on screenshots - 
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