How to Easily Do Screen Captures For Your Blog

There is a cool little piece of software I learned about at last year’s Blog Expo that I’d like to share with you guys as it really speeds up the process of doing screen captures for your Blog posts, power point presentations or anything else you’d like to use it for.

The software is called Jing, and it’s from a company called Tech Smith who some of you may know from their other popular software called Camtasia Studio which allows you to capture and create screen capture videos of your screen.

Think of Jing as a really lightweight, scaled down version of Camtasia that just quickly does screen captures and then goes away and leaves you alone. 

When you install the software and run it, Jing will put a small yellow dot at the top of your screen.  You can move it around and place it anywhere you want where it’ll be out of the way.  When you hover over it, here’s what it looks like:

It’s very simple.  You only have three options – “Capture”, “History” and “More”.  The first step to taking a capture is to click on the “Capture Button”:

Then you select the area on your screen that you’d like to capture:

As you can see, the software fades everything to black and white and anything in the capture frame becomes color.  While capturing the software even tells you the pixel size of the image being captured.  Once you capture the picture it brings up this little window:

In this window you can Add Arrows, Add Text, Add Frames and Highlight Areas of the picture using the toolbar on the left.  You can then save the picture to your hard drive, or even set it up to FTP upload your pictures to a folder on your website.

Once you’re done, the picture looks like this:

I know, nothing super spectacular about this software.  It’s not going to do your taxes or clean your room, but if you’re looking for an easy way to do screen captures for your Blog it doesn’t get any easier than Jing. 

Oh yeah, it also does screen captures of videos, and allows has features for instantly sharing screen shots or video’s using their Screencast network. 

You can download Jing for free or get a more detailed feature list on their site here:

http://www.jingproject.com/features/

Now go install it and start capturing things. 

Be careful though, it can get pretty addictive.

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