our computer screens contain a treasure trove of amazing stuff stuff that we want to capture
that we want to share that we want to save and we capture information on our screen using a
tool called screen capture software no surprise there it's also sometimes called screen grabbing
software but not all screen capture software is created equal oh no no no in fact there is royalty
in the screen capture space and that royalty is snagit indeed snagit is the sovereign of screen
grabbing so if you want to capture information from your computer screen be it video be it text
be it websites be it anything at all that appears on your computer screen you are in the
right place because today we are exploring screen capture the way it should be snagit on dottotech
steve dotto here how the heck you doing this fine day you know we tend to think of screen capture
software as something that's just kind of built into our system we probably don't give it a lot
of thought we probably use our simple system tools to occasionally do a screen capture but if you're
doing it that way you are missing so much because snagit is a tool that will completely redefine how
you look at screen capture now before we begin though let me fill you in a little bit about
this video a couple of months ago techsmith the creators of snagit reached out to me and asked me
if i'd like to do some videos with them and i said would i you bet because i have been a customer of
techsmith and actually i've had a snagit license since night 2016 for over five years now i have
been a customer and it has become one of my daily drivers a tool that i use each and every day
so i was really happy to be able to share how i use snagit and what i think of snagit with you
so thanks to techsmith for sponsoring this video and let's get into things
okay let's get into it and see if i can show you why i've been using snagit for five years
uh now when you install snagit on your mac it will appear here in the top menu bar as
a drop down this gives you access to the little control panel and if you're in windows it's the
exact same except it's the opposite it's down in the bottom coming up from the tool tray uh
but this is a little control panel that allows us to control snagit and control the type of capture
we're going to create because snagit will capture more than just still images it will capture video
it will capture audio it'll capture scrolling images it'll capture all of those different things
so that that's why we need a control panel rather than just a simple hotkey for doing a screen grab
now you can set up hotkeys within it as well but for now i'll just show you the menu system here so
let's just start with a simple all-in-one capture by all in one it means it'll give you the option
of choosing the type of capture you want once you've decided where it is on your screen that
you want to capture because snag it's always going to relate the capture to an area of the screen
so when i click capture you get the expected crosshairs which allow you to demark the area
that you want to capture now snagit's got a lot of smarts built into its it'll automatically
block out different areas of the screen so here i'm in a web page so it recognizes that i probably
don't want to capture all of the toolbars on the webpage so i just click here in the middle of the
screen it'll capture this whole screen but if i start marqueeing if i start selecting it will
then choose different preset sizes in order to if we're going to be say creating a thumbnail
image for a youtube video it's giving us here the proper dimensions for a typical widescreen
hd image so you have the option of all of those things once you've selected the area then you have
the choice of what type of capture you want to make so if i click on this the camera icon it'll
just take a picture if i click on the video camera you know what's going to do it's going
to capture a video and this is terrific if i'm going to be say be capturing a series of menus
in a process on the screen that i want to capture and this one here is interesting this is called
a panoramic scrolling capture so what it'll do is say you're at working on a website with your team
and you're designing a new website and this will allow us to capture the entire website to scroll
down and capture the entire breadth of the website in a single capture so that if you're annotating
it marking up and having a conversation with your team about it you have the whole file and
when it's not a series of screen captures of each individual screen very powerful once you're ready
to go you simply click in the middle i'm going to choose picture and it takes a picture of whatever
it is that you captured now here is where snagit really separates itself from other screen capture
tools typically speaking if you do a screen capture using a system tool it'll grab the
image and then allow you to share it maybe mark it up a little bit but this is a full-blown graphics
editor that's built into snagit and this is part of the magic of snagit this is where snagit sets
itself apart because i've got along the top here all of these different tools for marking up and
working with this image and down on the bottom i have a library of previous captures that i've
had this contains an entire library of all of the captures that i've made so if i've got something
that i've marked up or a screen capture that i use regularly to tell people how to do something
i've got access to it here without capturing it again it's a library that we can use as a resource
as we move ahead now typically speaking you're going to use some of these different markup tools
here in order to illustrate whatever it is you want to communicate with your team or if you're
using it so if you want to add an arrow you click on the arrow tool and then the toolbar on
the right-hand side here gives you your different options and then you start drawing and you start
marketing up and you do all of those sorts of things that you would expect to be able to do
in a simple markup tool you can all do right here within the snagit capture window once you're in
the editor and the cool thing is if you close it down and you go on with your day and then you go
back into the editor we can just get back into the editor by clicking on snagit again and saying here
open editor you still have that image available to you as well as all of the other images and you can
continue to mark it up if you choose to i can uh here let's take a look at some of the more tools
and let's choose oh let's say you want to hide uh a uh something that is that you don't want like is
private like a like a serial number or something like that or a password you can mark it up before
you go to share it once you've finished with the image and you're ready to use it you then have the
option all of these different options of sharing it you can share it directly out to variety of
different applications like dropbox you can use it within slack in order to communicate with
your teammates you can copy and paste it and use it in some other way but you've got all of these
different sharing options and that's the normal flow of a screen capture typically speaking when
you're capturing a screen it's because you want to use it to communicate so being able to then take
that screen capture mark it up in some way to illustrate whatever it is you're thinking about
and then sharing it with whoever it is that you're capturing it for that's the normal
flow that we have on almost all of our screen captures and snagit performs that brilliantly
now to be fair a lot of what i've just showed you you can do in most system-based screen capture
tools ones that are built into your operating system capture an image do a simple markup and
share it but let's start to look at the more advanced features that are baked into snagit
and the first thing i want to talk about is i want to talk about the power of this library the fact
that we've got if you look here in the bottom this bin of all of our previous captures if we click on
the very top we have the ability to view all of them in this library form and this is a terrific
browser that allows us to see historically all of the different images that we've grabbed which
as you look at it like this you might think well that's so busy how am i ever going to find exactly
what it is i'm looking for if i've got a valuable capture from before ah they've got this navigator
built in that allows you to tag images if you want to tag them so you can search based on tags but
you can also search based on image type and here's the most useful as far as i'm concerned this
drop down here applications it shows you which applications you captured different images from
so if i say for example let me find something in here oh if i said i want to find a screen capture
that i did when i was in my audio editing tool which is hindenburg right here i click on that and
just the captures that i did within hindenburg are listed out isn't that amazing so i can go back in
and i can take a look at the thing that i captured if i need to share it again that gives you some
real control because information is only useful if you can get your hands on it when you want
to share it so having access to all of these different images here in the library and being
able to sort them and store them in different ways so that we can recall them that it makes it far
more valuable so that is built in right away so of course we can go back in and we can edit
any of the images that we want at any time so let's go back in and let's go back and show you
a little bit more about the image editor because that i used to use adobe photoshop elements just
the light version of adobe photoshop for doing simple little editing tasks that i had on graphics
i have since i started to use snagit more and more use photoshop less and less to the point where
i haven't opened photoshop in several years now because i do almost all of my simple image editing
here inside of snagit and you see along the top i showed you a few of the tools the blur tool
but there are all of these other tools that are available to us including by the way the ability
to do this let me find uh it's not just you don't have to just work with the image that you have
but if you want to bring another image in and combine images let me grab this little screen
capture that i had here bring it in and so you can compose images with mult from multiple screen caps
you can compose different different types of images edit them resize graphics
and then ultimately take the entire graphic flatten it down into a simple jpeg image to share
it if you want or leave it in layers like this just like it is if it was in photoshop so that
you can continue to edit and manipulate it that's pretty cool is it not i think you'll agree but i'm
going to show you some of the other features that are built in here as well uh as i say
you're going to want to spend some time and play with all of the different tools that there are
but built into the software we've got the ability to say if we marquee a piece of text like this we
just put a marquee around it and i right click my mouse on it i can grab the text it takes the text
and then it grabs it and it lists it off the page and it turns it into editable text that i can
copy into word processors so if you have pages that you captured screen captures of that are
have a lot of text on it that you may want to utilize reuse or edit later on you can convert it
from a graphic image into text for editing right built in to this tool they've thought of a lot
with snagit i can promise you that but here's the last thing that i want to show you here before i
show you another use case within snagit and this is one of my favorite features in snagit this is
the ability to do step graphics if i click on this tool here you'll see in the toolbar on the side
i've got all of these different images that i can use and if i just go here and say this is first
this is second and this is third you see how it drops these little markers so that
you can kind of have step graphics and you can illustrate different points if you're adding
different annotation now where this becomes really useful is i want to show you a bit of a use case
one of the really outstanding features as far as i'm concerned using a tool like snagit
is being able to create step-by-step instructions so that you can delegate tasks to team members
or you can communicate to customers the proper procedure in order to enroll or to do a different
to do some sort of different task now for example i'll just walk you through an example
i use a tool called blink which is a a url shortener and whenever we create any new
urls that we want to share within the dottotech brand i create a blink a shortened link that has
my simple branding d o t t dot t o slash whatever it is that we want that topic to be so i might
want to teach an assistant how to create these links and properly put them into our catalog of
links so that they're used properly so that we can track them and we can see exactly how they're used
it's a simple process but it's one that we do on a daily basis and if somebody else could do it
for me it would save me a tremendous amount of time so using snagit what i can do is i can go
through and i can take a series of screenshots of each step just like this i just go through and do
a screenshot of this particular image capture it and then go step by step i'd go from blink there
i'd go to a separate screen within blink and walk you through the process and i've already done this
i've kind of it's like a cooking show where i've pre-baked all of the different graphics for you
uh to do that so but here are the graphics that i created for that this is the first one which is
i want you to do this and i drew the arrow to this and at this point here i want to do this first
then this then this and i've explained each step of the way and then finally i want you
to go into our spreadsheet and i want you to copy it into here so that we can have it in our library
it's just a simple kind of three-step process that they have to go through
now let me show you the tools that they have built into here to help us do that if i click
on create here in the library what it does is it says do you want to create an image from template
yes indeed i do because watch what happens it has these templates where i can open them up and i can
say this is the template that i want to use and when i choose that template it has these blank
images it's kind of all preformed for me so i can go through and i can grab each step that i created
and drop it in and then you can build out the rest of the text of each one and drop the same one i'll
show you the final result here before we go you can then frame them you can resize the graphics
you can add text to them and then you've got a wonderful tutorial document that you can save
as a pdf or you can save as a graphic that you can share with your team with your customers
with your clients you can share it anywhere and you don't have to recreate it each time
so look at how good this is i s in about i think it took me about 15 minutes to do this the first
time but i never have to explain this procedure again so taking some time to create one of these
documents for the procedures that you have to convey over and over again and are important
they are done correctly that is pure gold in this these templates make it really easy my
imagination started to fire with different ways i could use this when i was first shown this feature
that's the template feature built into snagit now we've spent all of our time up to now just
talking about using snagit as a graphics tool but snagit will also capture video either screen
capture video capturing our motion on the screen or our video that comes from a webcam or from a
digital camera of some sort so let me just show you some of those additional features
now i want to show you the video capabilities that is built into snagit and this is real screen
casting this is the same this is actually the same sort of technology that i'm producing this video
for you right now so if we go over into snagit here and again let's use an all-in-one again
so we can see all of the different options click capture now instead of just capturing the main
screen i'm going to capture the top of the screen here is because i want to be able to see some
i want to be able to see some menus and stuff because typically speaking when you're doing a
screen capture like this you're going to want to be able to move your mouse and your cursor around
on the screen and to illustrate a process uh you might want to use it as a tutorial as a marketing
tool as instructions as tech support a lot of different ways that you might want to do this
but this is basic screen capture that we're doing right now so once i've done that i look down here
in the bottom and i click on record video when i do that i get some new options the first option
i get is i can turn on my webcam or i can just capture the screen itself i can also choose to
turn on or off my microphone at this point but let's turn on the camera and when i click on this
up pops up pops in this particular case my webcam so it's a little bit meta right now
you're viewing me on one camera you see me here on the screen and another camera so there's a few
different things happening but now we've set it up so that we can record and if i click on the little
carrot here i can choose different cameras if i have them installed on my computer
as well i can choose different positions for the video to be in as as as i record so this
is very similar to some of the different screen capture tools that you might be paying for in
order for doing quick little screen captures for say sending video emails or for doing quick little
tutorials it does those sorts of things once we're ready to record we click on the record button
and we get a countdown because we want to make sure that we prepare and check that we don't have
any lettuce in our teeth and then we're recording so what is happening right now is being recorded
so if i was going to be doing a bit of a tutorial where i wanted to show people how to choose their
bookmarks or how to do anything at all within the computer screen i have the opportunity to do that
right now to capture all of these different elements and in fact in the preferences i can
even choose whether or not you see the cursor or not or you don't see the cursor etc but once
this is all finished we click stop and then it takes the recording and it saves it again into
the library and here we have it in the library and i'll play it back for you we don't have any
letters in our teeth and then we're recording so what is happening right now is being recorded
so now we can take this video and we can do simple basic trimming and editing on the video
but we have a great screencast that we can use uh to communicate to educate to market to we can use
it for all of those sorts of purposes and because techsmith because snagit is built as a sharing
tool as well as a capture tool we have the ability if i go over here into the share menu to take this
and send it right away to screencast.com so this will take this video upload it to screencast.com
which you get a free account uh when you sign up for snagit you get a free account with a
limited amount of storage but enough to certainly store these sorts of videos and then you can just
share that link with others so this provides the same functionality as you might find in a tool
like loom but you can do so much higher quality videos and so much higher quality work as far as
as far as sharing your content using snagit it is it's i guess i hate to use the term but
it is the swiss army knife for all things that on your screen to share with others
i think i better start wrapping things up because as i look at the list of features and
benefits within snagit that i wanted to cover when i started i realize i'm just a little over halfway
through all of the benefits that i wanted to share with you but i think i've given you a good idea of
the value that snagit brings and why it's a tool that is indispensable for me and you know the
thing that you should consider is from the time that i invested in snagit five years ago to today
it has increased its value to me because every time i share a graphic that i can reuse
and repurpose over and over again it increases its equity as far as i'm concerned because i don't
have to go and grab that graphic again in order to share it i've got it there in my library or video
so it just increases its value the longer that you use it and that's why i'd be really reticent
to use any other tool the value of the sharing and the library as well as the editing that all just
comes together to kind of make a perfect cocktail as far as i'm concerned for my screen capture
tool well i'm going to wrap things up as i said so if you have enjoyed this video i would love
you to hit that like button share any comments suggestions with us in the in the comments
and as all the cool kids on youtube say pound that subscribe button and we will see you next time
right here on dottotech until then have fun storming the castle