Using Paint to take Great Screenshots


There are many great products for taking screenshots out there. Snagit is the one I’d recommend most. 

However, if you’re on a tight budget, you may have to make do with Paint, which comes pre-installed with Windows. 

Paint is a very under-rated product and comes with more features that you’d probably expect. If you learn to use it properly, it will probably save you having to buy a specialist product. 

So, what I’m going to do is show you how to take nice, clean screenshots with Paint.

How to take a standard screenshot

  1. Open the page, image or website that you want to take the screenshot of.
  2. Press the PrtSc key on your keyboard.
    On my laptop, this is above the letter F10. On my desktop, it’s between the keys and the number pad. This takes a screenshot (like a photograph) of the entire desktop.
    Later we will look at how to screenshot floating windows, where you have many items floating above each other on the screen at the same time, such as pop-up windows.
  3. Open Paint. Use Ctrl + V to paste in the screenshot.
    Let’s say that you only want the logo and not the entire page. To do this, use the Select tool. using-paint-to-take-great-screenshots.JPG
  4. Select the area you want to extract from the image, i.e. the logo.
  5. Press Ctrl + C to copy the logo to the Clipboard.
    You now have a large image with a hole in it where you’re logo used to be. What we want to do next is remove this image, copy the logo back into Paint, and do some tidying up.  
  6. Press Ctrl + A (to select the work area in Paint) and press Delete. This wipes the screen clean.
  7. Press Ctrl + V to paste the logo back into Paint.
    The next step is to tidy up the image.
  8. Use the Select tool again and drag a thin box along the edge of the logo. 
  9. Press Delete to remove the area you selected with the box.
    You can repeat this step to tidy up the image. 
  10. Use the Select tool to select the image. 
  11. Press Ctrl + C to copy the image and then paste it into Word or whatever program wants to use it.