I've been looking for a good print screen/screen capture tool since Windows 1.0. I've found a few but eventually they just didn't do everything I needed in a Windows environment (DOS was pretty easy, no multiple windows).

Ran into Print Screen Deluxe and finally had my desires fulfilled, it's one of those programs that cause me to slap my head and say "ah, so this is how it's supposed to be done". It's a gem.

The install is as quick and easy and anything I've ever installed, not a problem.

Fire it up and it gives you a step through asking what you want to do:

Want to change what you're capturing? Click on that option and you can select the entire screen, active window, a menu, a clipboard image, a region you select or text within a Window. Oh, and you can create an AVI movie of events as they occur within the selected region. Since I wanted to create the above image for this article you can see I selected the Active Window and saved it to a file which you now see above. I could have selected other output such as any defined printer or "scrape the text" and put it in a file or all three.

Speaking of capturing the text I tried it on a registry cleaner as usually the info being scanned goes by way too fast for me to actually read it. I set PSD on it and sure enough, it created a text file with the info:

Building Index
ADODB.Record.2.7\CLSID ==>
ADODB.Record.2.8\CLSID ==>
ADODB.Recordset\CLSID ==>
and so on and so on.

The only screen to text that PSD seemed to choke on were PDF files. My bank sends me electronic statements; I'd love to be able to scrape the text off of them, run them through a filter and then feed them into my accounting program for automatic reconciliation. I don't think I'd ever actually get that done even if I could extract the text from the PDF but it sounds impressive.

The only other thing I noticed was that PSD only worked on the primary monitor on my two monitor system but that was minor. I only need to drag the area I wanted to capture over to the primary screen.

But those are minor nits, let's look at what you can do with an image once you have it captured. Select your region, active window, whatever you want to capture and it appears in the PSD control panel:

As you can see (hopefully, I wanted to make sure dial up visitors could load this page this month so if the images are too small my apologies) I've capture an active window which happened to be the True Image control panel. Now suppose I wanted to edit this image. Save it and bring it up in my image editor program? Nah, not needed, with PSD I simply click on the image and bang:

Up comes a full image editor complete with ability to add text which is a great feature. You can select the background color of the text box and even the type of font and font properties of the text. I can now add text to point to specific areas of the image that I want to point out.

Other options abound; create an arrow, special effects like contrast, sharpen, blur and features you'd expect in an good paint program; resize, boxes, undo, erase, zoom in/out, mark and more.

All in all this is simply a well crafted and well thought out program that just about any computer user would find useful and it will certainly make my highlights and wedge a permanent place in my utility toolbox. I urge you to check it out.

Free to try, 29.95 to buy.

Click here to immediately download the spyware free 3.4Mb free trial or click here to go to the PCNet download page.