Hey, as can be seen, I like to cover a wide array of stuff in this site.
This might become a bit of a ever changing post, as I may continue trying new programs as I find limitations on the one I’m using at the moment.
So, in my reviews of VNs, I published some screenshots.
Screencapture software is always a very subjective and broad matter. (strangely, one would think it would be a fairly mundane subject)
So, for years I had used MWSnap , but it is now very very old and a bit too feature rich for my needs (I can use Photoshop, Paint.net or GIMP for my image cropping needs). And PrintScreen key wasn’t usable as an hotkey (Main factor, mostly because I was using it on a game with lots of key shortcuts). On the positive side, it’s extremely lightweight. (consuming ~10MB of ram)
So I started searching for something else.
My requirements were very straightforward and easy to fulfil, even if it doesn’t look like at first sight, I wanted it to:
- Save the captures on PNG format (a good quality/size compromise when compared to BMP or other lossless format)
- Be able to capture fullscreen, single window and area within a window (although I could forfeit the last one, I would just crop it on the image editing program)
- Option to save the capture silently (e.g. press PrtScrn and it would automatically save the file on my screenshot directory without asking me anything, Shift+PrtScrn and it would save the window; I could deal with it asking me which window, but I want it to be fairly unintrusive)
- Also nice would be the ability to capture D3D overlays.
- Last but not least, FREE (Open source was great, freeware closed source was great and free ‘lite’ version of a paid product was quite acceptable)
So, tried so far and my opinion on them (some opinions based on weeks of use, other on mere minutes, 10/10 doesn’t mean it’s perfect, it means it did everything I wanted very well):
Gadwin PrintScreen — Was working great for a few days until I tried capturing a Direct3D app, then it just captured a black screen, thought maybe it was just that particular game that was being a little bastard (as it tends to just stop working after Alt+tabbing or any loss of focus (even in windowed mode), but it wasn’t tried with another game and it just captured the desktop. So, if you want to capture D3D overlays, search elsewhere. Other than that it worked pretty nicely, 7/10. (revised score: 8/10)
Greenshot — Right after the annoying failure of Gadwin PrintScreen, I tested this one, now equipped with the knowledge that it probably wouldn’t capture D3D overlays, I had a small list of 3 different games to try, two of them D3D based, one being the very picky one that doesn’t like alt+tabbing.
Did slightly worse than Gadwin, mostly because in one of the games it wouldn’t even play the capture sound (which I like exactly due to this kind of thing), turns out that game had a integrated screenshot function hence it seems like Greenshot wouldn’t even get the hotkey signal. (but Gadwin did…) Result on D3D, same black screen.
So, again, for D3D overlays (and I would guess OpenGL?) try somewhere else. 6/10. (revised score: 7.5/10; extra half point for being open source)
DuckCapture — No overlay capture and always asks what to do with the capture, hence no “silent capture”. Also from what I understood only has a set list of possible hot keys. 4/10. (revised score: 5/10)
CaptureIt Plus — No PrintScreen as hotkey, no overlay capture, strangely slow. 4/10. (revised score: 8/10)
Screenshot captor — No overlay capture, other than that seemed pretty decent, minimalist interface, albeit with so many configuration options that one could feel lost. 6/10 (revised score: 7/10)
PrtScr — No D3D overlay capture, no silent saving. 4/10. (revised score: 5/10)
SnapShot — No printscreen as hotkey, no D3D overlay capture, other than that seems decent. 5/10. (revised score: 6/10)
Shotty! — You know these programs that try so hard to be minimalist and different that they end up failing? This is one. Tried taking a fullscreen screenshot of my desktop and have no idea what it did, but it didn’t capture the screen. 0/10. (revised score: 0/10)
*edit*
You know what…scrap the parts that say that overlay capture doesn’t work. Why?
Seems like Aero really fucks with the programs. Disabled it and suddenly could capture from the games I was trying. So I gave most of them one more point each.
Well, I’ll be using Gadwin PrintScreen or Greenshot.