FastStone Capture is a simple yet full-featured screen capture solution that allows you to totally or partly save your screen, either as an image file or as a video. The program offers you multiple tools to capture your screen under different conditions, and the process is fully configurable. This tool comes with its own editor that helps you customize your captures in several useful ways.
From simply saving something interesting you saw on your screen to creating entire video tutorials, it's sure that FastStone Capture has a convenient option to offer you. The program doesn't show the typical "main window" you might expect but, instead of it, you will see a small toolbar that allows you to execute any of the supported capture methods such as full-screen, active window, specific window/object, fixed rectangular area, freehand region, scrolling window and fixed-size region. However, each action has an attached keyboard shortcut you can use instead of the toolbar buttons, and you can customize the default key combinations according to your liking.
One of the toolbar buttons allows you to launch the Screen Recorder tool which, of course, helps you record on-screen video. The tool allows you to select the type of screen area you want to capture and to enable or disable your microphone. You can also configure more advanced parameters like the automatic addition of sounds and/or animations for the mouse click events. During the video recording, you can use the F5 key to zoom your screen to 200% or return to the normal size, and the Ctrl+F10 key combination to pause or resume the recording. Once you finish you can save your video but, unfortunately, the only video format supported by FastStone Capture is WMV.
Talking about the screenshots, the program offers you multiple types of destinations you can choose to automatically send your captures as soon as they are taken. Among those destinations are an editor, clipboard, a file, a printer, an e-mail, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and web (via FTP). Each available destination requires different sets of parameters to be configured, which can be done through the program's settings window. As for the program's image editor, it allows you to apply multiple effects to your captures: rotation, watermarks, texts, arrows and shapes, resizing, edges, blur, and others.
To sum it all up, FastStone Capture is an excellent tool when it comes to taking screenshots or recording on-screen video. The program is very lightweight and its price is pretty affordable. Thanks to its multiple functions and tools, FastStone Capture is way over the standard screen capture functionality that comes by default with MS Windows.
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