Faststone Capture is a screenshot capturing utility that can capture the entire desktop, individual windows or objects as scrolling areas offscreen .
It can capture specific regions within a screen in a rectangular, circular, and freehand selections.
It also contains a practical editor that can process captured images with features such as resizing, cropping, contrast, sharpen, and text annotation.
- Faststone Image Capture can capture everything that is on screen, including objects such as launchers, open menus, and other applications. It will also capture web pages, including parts of the website that are not visible on screen.
- The post-capture processing options that this program has are sophisticated and really add a lot of value compared to other programs. I’m a big fan or the text annotation functions in particular which work really well.
- The program has a very nice look and feel; it can be accessed through a small floating control panel or minimized in the windows tray area (I’m partial to the windows tray icon, but both work really well).
- The screen magnification (used when capturing specific regions) is very nicely implemented compared with other screen capture programs I have used. It works very well post-capture in the editor as well.
- Images can be saved in a wide variety of outputs (BMP, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and TGA).
- Screen color picker function: you can use this to point to any area on the screen to identify the html color value.
- Other esoteric features include multi-monitor support, and the ability to specify where the captured image will be sent (editor, clipboard, or file).
This is by far my favorite screen capturing program (I compared no less than 4 others before writing this review). It is powerful, well designed, and uses a very small amount of memory.
[Update 8/2/2007: since writing this review this program has become shareware, but you can download the last freeware version (5.3) here]
Version tested: 4.7
Go to Program Download Page for the latest version. The Program home page.
