How To Make Professional Images With Annotations From Screen Capture | Small Biz Marketing Specialist
How To Make Professional Images With Annotations From Screen Capture

How To Make Professional Images With Annotations From Screen Capture

So you want to know how to how to do a scrolling screen capture? You want to know how the pros add zoom, blurs, arrows and annotations to their images? “Digital Dave” walks through an awesome screen capture tool that you can use for screen capture and editing to create images like a pro in no time.

Episode Transcript

So we’re going to look at a tool that does a really good job of screen capture, has some very cool features built into it that we use. And that’s called Snagit. And Snagit is a product that is created by TechSmith, and you can find it at www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.html. And this application has two flavors to it, like a lot of applications. One is a free trial. The only downside of the free trial is it only lasts 15 days. Then, you have to decide whether or not you want it or not, but certainly is good enough to use Snagit for 15 days. And I believe you can do pretty much everything. There are no limitations on what you can do.

And then, after 15 days, you can buy it now for $49.95. I mean, the price has gone up a bit over the years. I’ve been using this application for many years. Even at $49.95, it’s a bargain because of some of the cool things you can do right in the images within the Snagit application. So we’re going to jump on over, and we’re just going to look at a random website here.

And this is the 10 questions that stumped the masses this year and their answers. Now, not that we’re going to spend any time going through what those 10 questions are, but we’re actually going to do some things with Snagit with this page that I think you’ll find very cool and very helpful if you decide to purchase or use this application.

The first thing is a lot of times, you’ll look at a page like this and it’s very long. I mean, it’s got multiple images or threads, and it’s very long. And you’re like, “Well, I’m going to make a copy of this entire page. How do I do this?” And so there’s a couple options. One is you could kind of Snagit … or snip it together by taking one screen, and then scrolling down, and taking the next screen, and then compiling the whole thing into one image. That would be kind of painful, I think.

Another way to do it is with Snagit. Snagit, itself, has a tool where you can actually capture … oh, it says they’ve got a new version. I guess I’ll get this later. But I can capture this screen, and when I do, I get these little arrows that are pointing. And I can capture this screen to the right. I can capture this screen to the scrolling area to the corner or down.

And so what I’m going to do, to illustrate how this works, is I’m going to click the down arrow. And it’s actually going to scroll and capture this screen from top to bottom. So you can see, it’s actually capturing the whole thing, which is pretty cool, right? This saves so much time if you’re trying to get a screen capture of an entire screen of a website, particularly when it’s a very long page like this one.

So you’ll see, it’ll process. And then, we’ll go back over to our image editor, and we’ll see this image in full, the entire thing, from top to bottom. You could see actually that I had it on the screen before. Here’s the one that just came up, but here’s a larger version of it. And all I simply did to make it larger was I went to zoom in, and I can zoom in more and more. And actually, I made it … this is a good size to kind of view for our video purposes today. Now, we can see this entire scrolling page, right? So it’s a pretty cool feature.

Now, I’m going to show you some other cool editing tools within Snagit that I find extremely kind of fun. So these are some of those professional things you see people do all the time. You’re probably wondering, “Jeez, how do they do this?” So I’m actually going to walk through with some of the Snagit editor features. I’m going to start over here on the more menu.

And we’re going to do a couple things like we’re going to do steps. We’re going to add steps to this, so we’re going to make this step one. We’re going to make this step two, and we’re going to make this step three, and we’re going to make this step four. See how easy and quick that was? I literally put a little icon on there illustrating steps within this particular page itself. Now, I’m going to take these back out. Oh, maybe we’ll leave them in. We’ll accumulate the things that we’re doing.

Another neat feature that you see a lot of times is people drawing, and you can draw on this. You can circle things. You can say, “Okay. I want to circle this and really make this stand out here. Maybe I want to draw an arrow from this down to this down here, and then I’ll draw a little arrow like that.” Now, there are better ways to draw arrows on this, and I’ll show you that in a minute, because you can clearly see I’m terrible at drawing with this. But you get the point.

You can then go in and do things like a blur. So I’m going to actually say, “Oh, jeez, I don’t want this guy to show. I’m going to actually blur him out,” and you can just use your thing here. And you can see that it blurs, and if you want to blur it more, you just go over it a second time, and it’ll blur it even more so you can barely see the guy. So that’s kind of how they do the blur effects on images when they want to blur something out.

In addition to that, a lot of times, you’ll see people take something that they want to really make it stand out on the page, and they’ll magnify that. So the way to do that is you click on this little magnify thing here. Say we want to pop out more, so we’ll kind of just circle that, and we’ll pop out the eyes. So you can clearly see how quickly you can put some very professional annotations and stuff on your images using the Snagit editor, and you can do a scrolling screen capture.

And we’re not done yet. There are many other things you can do within this editor. I’m not going to go through all of them. I’m just going to kind of cover them. You can put stamps on your page. Fill … maybe you want to change the color. Maybe you want to change white to green. So I can come over here, clock on this green, click fill, and that will change everywhere that’s white to green. And it really makes my red arrow and circle stand out.

I can add shapes. I can add callouts. Callouts are really nice because you can put them on there and put text within them. So maybe you want to make this guy speaking, so I might come over here. And I’ll do maybe this call out here, and all right. And I’ll put in here that this is a test. Now, you can’t really see my writing, because it’s pretty small on this very large image. So I’m going to have to make this very big to see it, so I’m going to have to highlight it and then make it, like, 72. And then, you can see that this is my call out, and I can put this right next to this guy right here.

So you can put callouts. You can add text anywhere on the page just by dragging the text editor in here and typing your text. And then, of course, you can do real arrows, all right? My arrow was terrible before, so let’s make a real arrow here. I’ll just draw it down from here down to here, or maybe down to this guy right here. And you can see, I’ve got a real arrow there versus my drawn arrow. And those are just some very quick things.

Now, one that I use a lot, as well … and you’ve probably seen this a lot of times, is the highlighter. And with the highlighter, you can literally go through text, and you can say, “Maybe I want to highlight this and make it stand out, so I’ll make it yellow.” All right? Now, of course, we have a green background right here in our fill, so now, the yellow doesn’t stand out as well. But you can see that you can accumulate your annotations that you’re putting on top of your text very easily with the Snagit editor.

Now, I’m going to show you a trick in this video that a lot of people don’t know, and that trick is that a lot of times, you’ll go to the web. And you’ll see an image, and let’s just take one of these images … just take this image right here, okay? And you’ll be like, “Wow, you know, I like that image, but I need it … really, I need it bigger. I need it much bigger than it is right here.”
And so one way to do that is you can right click and save as and then go open the image and kind of see how big it is, or you can do inspect and actually if you want to look at it in the code, it’ll probably tell you. But the easy way is right click, save it, and then open it up in some type of editor, and it’ll tell you. So I have this open in Microsoft Editor, and it tells me that this image is 1200 by 600. It’s pretty big already underneath if I just save the image.

But I want it bigger. I want this to go in a video that’s going to be 1920 by 1080, and I want it to be my background. So I need it to be big. I need it to be almost the whole size of the screen. One thing you can do that will allow you to take a smaller image, usually, and make it much bigger without losing a lot of contrast is to actually increase the screen size. So you can do that by going to your browser and going over … or zooming on the screen, I should say, and just zooming in on that screen.

So I’m actually going to take this image up to 250 percent. You can see the image is much bigger now, right? So it’s much bigger than it was even in the editor, alright? And then, what I’m going to do is I’m going to use my editor, my Snagit editor … or sorry, my Snagit, and I’m going to go and I’m going to snag this image at this size right here. Now, I could make this even bigger if I wanted to, so let’s do that. Let’s make this … pump it up to 300, alright? And I’m going to try to grab this whole image, and we’re going to see the difference in the size once I’m done.

I’m going to go ahead, and I don’t want those little annotations on there from this blog. But I’m going to click on my snag here, and you can get very precise with this. I can go literally right to the last pixel in this image … and I’m not going to spend too much time doing this, because it’s always tricky to get it exactly there. Oh, I got it, but I got the whole screen, so that’s not what I wanted to do.

The nice thing is, with this editor, I can just click X and start over again, so I’m going to go ahead and capture this again. And I’m going to try to get this right on the outside. Oh, I got the annotation again, so I don’t want that. It’s fine. We’ll leave it on there. I’m doing this for illustration. And so I’m going to go down here. I got it right on the edge, and I’m going to come all the way down here, and I’m going to grab it all the way down to the bottom edge of the screen here.

And what you can see is the image is 1837 by 777, once I capture this. Now, to capture it, I can just go ahead and click the little camera button, and it’s captured. And of course, I got those annotations, and I don’t want them. But the difference is, I just took an image that was 1200 by … what did I say? 1200 by 600, and I was able to make it 1700 and something by 777, or something. So if you want to see the image size, you can just do resize the image, and it’ll tell you. Now, I made it 1837 by 777.

And you can see, by looking at this image, I really did not lose quality. So this is a great way to use Snagit to go and take an image that may be smaller and actually enlarges it. And usually, you can do that without losing a lot … or the picture becoming very pixelated or granular, particularly if the images are high res even in a smaller state. Now, it’s very hard to take a very small image and make it huge, but I have had success doing that, even, taking a 300 by 400 image and making it 1200 by 600 or whatever the proportions are without losing a lot of resolution.

Again, this is a great snagging tool for snagging screenshots. It’s got a lot of great functionality in it, as well as a very nice editor to allow you to do cool, professional annotations to your images right within the editor itself. And it’s called Snagit editor, and it’s put out by techsmith.com. that’s it for this week’s episode of Where Marketing Meets Technology, and we’ll catch you all next week. Thank you. Have a great day.

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About the Author smallbizmarketing

Stacey Riska, aka "Small Business Stacey" is a serial entrepreneur who is passionate about saving small - and not so small - businesses one marketing plan at a time. She helps business owners become a #SmallBizMarketingWiz by teaching them marketing strategies that get MORE: MORE leads, MORE customers/clients/patients, MORE sales, and MORE profit. Stacey's in-demand "Small Biz Marketing Success Coaching and Mastermind Program" is transforming the businesses - and lives - of those who want wealth, freedom, and market domination. Her highly acclaimed book "Small Business Marketing Made EZ" lays out the 6-simple-step plan to get your marketing into ACTION - literally and figuratively. Stacey is also the creator of Cups To Gallons, the place where independent coffee, smoothie, juice bar, ice cream, dessert and snack shop owners go to learn how get into lucrative catering so they stop selling by the cup and start selling by the gallon. In this program she teaches from experience, as it was the key strategy that transformed her coffee and smoothie business from being $500K in debt to a 7-figure profitable business. When not saving the small business world, she enjoys sipping red wine, eating chocolate (who doesn't!) and spending time with her amazing husband.

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