How to Make a Screenshot of the Current Image on Your Monitor

A screenshot is an image of what is currently showing on your computer's monitor. People make and use screenshots for a variety of reasons. For example, if you are reviewing a website, you might want to use a screenshot of the website's home page to illustrate your article.¹ If you have made a home made movie, you might want a screenshot of a particular scene to create a label for the jewel case.

How To Make A Screenshot

There are various ways you can make a screenshot. You can photograph your monitor with a camera, but the image will probably not be very good. You can also purchase software, or download freeware and shareware, that will make screenshots. But none of that is necessary. Your computer is already capable of making a screenshot, and it is easy to do. Here's how.

Find the Prt Scr (Print Screen) key on your keyboard.² This is usually found in the top row of keys on your keyboard, way over to the right. On my Compaq keyboard it is the third key from the right in the top row.

Press the Prt Scr key. That was simple.

While it appears like nothing has happened, the computer now has an image of your computer screen, a screenshot, stored in its memory.

After You Create The Screenshot, Then What?

What you do next will depend on why you wanted to make a screenshot in the first place. If you want to use the screenshot to illustrate an article, greeting card or some other document, you simply have to go to your document, and press Control V to paste the image into your document (or you can go to the Edit Menu of your document and click on Paste instead).

How To Save The Image So You Can Edit It And Use It Again Later

Saving the image is a little more complicated but still not very difficult. After you press Prt Scr, click on the Windows Start Menu at the bottom left corner of your screen. Scroll to Accessories and click on it. Find Paint in the Accessories Menu and click on it.

The Microsoft Paint program will now open up. Click on the Edit Menu and press paste (or press Ctrl V). Now your screenshot is available to edit using the Microsoft Paint program. If you simply want to save it, open the File menu and click on Save As. Give the picture a name and click on Save. Now your screenshot will be saved as a picture (.jpeg) file on your computer.

You might own a more sophisticated editing program, like Adobe Photoshop, that you can use to edit your screenshot. However, if you just want to save the screenshot, using Microsoft Paint program is the simplest and quickest way.

An Alternate Way Of Making A Screen Shot

Instead of just pressing the Prt Scr key, you can hold down the Alt key and then press the Prt Scr key. When you paste this screenshot into your document or into Microsoft Paint, you will notice something different. The Windows taskbar is missing from the bottom of your screenshot.

When you press Alt and Prt Scr, your computer only takes a screen shot of your active window. To better illustrate the difference between a screenshot taken with Prt Scr and one taken with Alt and Prt Scr, try this experiment.

Open two windows on your computer. Make both windows smaller by clicking on the Restore Down icon in each window. This is the icon in between the Minimize icon (-) and the Close icon (X) at the top right of each window. Now both windows will appear on your monitor's screen at the same time.

Press Prt Scr and paste the image into Paint or into your document. You will notice that the screenshot shows both windows as well as the background image. Now go back and do the same thing, but press Alt and Scr Prt. Paste the image into Paint or into your document, and you will see that it is only an image of your active window--the window you were lasting working in.

If You Are Running Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Enterprise or Ultimate

If you are running Windows Vista, excluding Vista Home Basic, you can use the Snipping Tool that came with Windows Vista to make screenshots. This is a different way of making screenshots than what I have described above. However, you might still find that if you just want a simple screenshot to paste into a document, that the Snipping Tool is more complicated than using Prt Scr.

Creating screenshots and using them in articles, greeting cards, dvd and cd labels and other documents is both fun and easy. You only have to make a few of them, and you will be an expert at it.

Footnotes

1. Be careful of how you use screenshots. You might be guilty of copyright infringement if you use a screenshot of someone's website or computer program without permission. While in some instances, the use of a screenshot might be covered under the Fair Use clause of the Copyright Act, I would advise consulting a lawyer before disseminating a screenshot that you have made.

2. The Prt Scr key might be labeled differently on your keyboard. On some keyboards, it is labeled Prt Scn.What is a screenshot and why you might want to make oneYou can learn how to make a screenshot in seconds.How to save and edit a screenshot.