I have a lot of people ask me, "What's a good program for getting screen captures?" They tried trial programs from Download.com, and for one reason or another, haven't liked them. But whether you like those programs or not, you should know that there is a much easier way to get screen captures, and it doesn't require a single download. Uninstall any programs that eat up your resources by waiting in the background for you to hit a key, because you don't even need them. I'm really not even sure what the point of a screen capture program is.

Screen Captures on a PC:

There is a button on your keyboard labeled: Print Screen. Sometimes the words are abbreviated. For instance, on the keyboard on my notebook, the Print Screen button is at the very top, directly above my function keys, toward the right side of the keyboard, and says, "PrntScr". On most standard keyboards, this key will be at the very top of the keyboard, somewhere around the Insert key on the right.

This button is all you need. When you hit the Print Screen button, it automatically copies your screen the clipboard. Once it's copied to the clipboard, simply open your favorite image editor, create a new file (with the dimensions of your current screen resolution - Photoshop does this automatically), and paste the image from the clipboard onto the picture. The easiest way to do this: after you create your new file and have a blank screen in front of you, just hit Ctrl+V.

To Capture the Entire Screen: Follow the directions above. Simply hit Print Screen, and the entire screen is copied to the clipboard, ready to be pasted onto an empty image document.

To Capture the Active Window Only: Hit Alt+Print Screen. This will copy whatever window is currently active onto the clipboard to be pasted onto your document.

Screen Captures on a Mac:

Screen captures work a bit differently if you're a Macintosh user.

To Capture the Entire Screen: Push Command + Shift + 3. Your capture will be saved to your startup drive, and will be labelled Picture 1 (your second capture will be labelled Picture 2, etc).

To Capture the Active Window: Push Caps Lock + Command + Shift + 4.

To Capture and User-Defined Area: Push Command + Shift + 4. Your pointer will become a cursor, and you can then select the area of your screen that you would like to capture.

Once you have your capture completed, you can open the file in your favorite image editor, and have fun with it.

That's it. Crop it, color it, transform it, whatever you want to do with it.

Update for PC Users

Windows 7 now comes with a "Snipping Tool". To use this, simply go to Start > Snipping Tool, draw a box around the part of your screen you would like to capture, and then save your file however you'd like. This new tool makes the process much simpler - but when working with Photoshop, the Print Screen button is still often your best bet.