Search

Popular Articles

Advertising

Informations

Home Blog Game Development AeroCapture
Error
  • Unable to fine menu item 17in rokdownload link
AeroCapture Print E-mail
Written by Markus Ewald   
Sunday, June 20 2010 14:30

Whenever I needed a screenshot of some application for this website, I used an image editor to cut out the window's drop shadow, generated an alpha channel from its luminance, added that as a layer behind the actual application window and saved the entire thing again.

Today I wrote a small utility to automate this process for me: AeroCapture. Pressing the "Print Screen" key will take a screenshot of the active window, and save it as a .png in the My Pictures directory, retaining the window's drop shadow in the image's alpha channel.

Screen capture of a small window showing a clip art of a digital camera

You can download it here: (C# source code included)

This got me thinking. Somehow, whenever I have the choice between...

  • spending 2 minutes doing a repetitive task that I've done a few dozen times before already (like fixing up the screenshot for my website)
  • or spending 4 hours to automate the task

...I always choose the 2 minutes approach. I can continue working on what I was planning to do and I don't have as many utilities to maintain.

What do you do in this situation?

< Prev   Next >
 

Comments  

 
0 #1 daedalus28 2010-08-06 02:10
I hold alt while pressing print screen...

Try it - it takes a screenshot of just the current window.
Quote
 
 
0 #2 Cygon 2010-08-11 17:19
Alt+Print Screen works, but the drop shadow won't be included in the picture. I wanted to preserve the shadow because, as you can see in the screenshot included in this article, it just looks cooler that way :)
Quote
 
 
0 #3 daedalus28 2010-08-12 00:27
I agree, it does look cooler :)

You could probably just use a css box shadow (and filters so it'll work in IE), though I guess it's a little more convenient with your tool. You'd probably get a lower page weight with css since the image would be smaller, but the effort might not be worth it.
Quote
 

Add comment


Security code
Refresh



Joomla Template by Joomlashack