FastStone Capture 6.2

FastStone Image Viewer 3.5

Not long after discovering Gadwin Printscreen, I came across FastStone Capture. This is even better and has now become my screen capture utility of choice. Not that there is anything wrong with the Gadwin utility, but FastStone adds a few extras that I find useful. In terms of ease of use, they are pretty much equal. FastStone uses different shortcuts for capturing different areas, while Gadwin uses one shortcut, but has an option to change the area captured. FastStone Capture is now $19.95 Shareware. The previous Freeware version FastStone Capture 5.3 is available from OldVersions.com. FastStone Image Viewer is still Freeware for Home Users.

Key Features

• Compatible with Windows 9x
• Simple Installation and Setup
• Uses the Print Screen SysRq key to capture the whole screen
• Print Screen + modifier keys to capture different regions
• All shortcuts are user-definable
• The Escape key cancels screen capture
• System tray icon for easy access to settings
• It doesn’t use the Windows clipboard unless you want it to
• Allows you to resize or move the capture area, or try again
• Saves the captured image as BMP GIF PCX PNG JPG TIF, PPM, TGA or PDF
• Very easy to use and configure
• Draw on the screen capture — shapes, lines, arrows, text boxes
• Capture Scrolling Web Pages as a single image.
• Add date and time stamps to the captured image.
• Includes Screen Magnifier
• Includes Colour picker
• Includes Screen Ruler
• A help file is included, but you may not even need to look at it
• Edit captures in external editors
• No nag screens, you can even turn off the splash screen.

Capture Settings

The capture tab of the settings dialogue offers options for launching FastStone on Windows startup, automatically minimising to the Windows System Tray is the most convenient and the least intrusive.

Hotkeys

The default hot keys are sensible and not hard to remember. Mostly I use PrintScreen or Alter PrintScreen. F12 will bring up the options dialogue when FastStone is active. Here you can change the shortcuts to use any modifier keys with PrintScreen.

Filename

The filename pattern can be defined for use when saving multiple captures to file, which can also be automatic without showing the FastStone editor for each screen capture. Filename patterns can be saved too, handy when you wish to resume work on a task you started some time ago. If you write program tutorials you will appreciate these sophisticated file naming options.

Auto Save

Choose the default directory for saving files. Choose a photo-editor for the command to open in an external application. Open the output folder or copy to the Windows clipboard (normally, screen capture does not overwrite the Windows clipboard).

FTP

Capture images can also be uploaded directly to a server. Enter your upload details and password to automate the process without opening an FTP program.

Editor

The Close button on the FastStone editor Window can be set to close the program or just minimize it to the system tray. By default, the capture editor will close as soon as you save the capture as a file, but you can have it remain open to continue working. FastStone’s capture editor is a mini application in its own right.

Other

The Screen Magnifier enables precise positioning when capturing a rectangular or freehand area of the screen. The magnifier’s options can be changed for greater precision. The Screen Colour Picker can show the colour of the selected pixel in a window with colour values, etc., or copy the colour values to the clipboard.

System Tray Icon

Left-click the system tray icon to display the toolbar. Click to select a capture area, or change options. Right-click the system tray icon and select an option from the menu.

Image Save Options

When you save an image from FastStone Capture (I always use PNG because it is lossless), click on the Options button to open the Save Options dialogue.

Default settings seem to be optimised for saving screen shots of dialogue boxes, but if you’re saving photorealistic images, you may get much better results by using a filter. Click on the Filter drop down to try the Paeth filter. To optimise file sizes for other images, try setting the compression level to Max (the default level is 6). The dialogue shows what the New file size will be so that you can immediately tell if the choice was a good one for that image. The dialogue may take some time to redraw the image previews if you’re taking screen shots of large, photorealistic images. The wait is worthwhile, however. A 4 Mbyte image saved without filtering may compress to not much more than 2 Mbytes with filtering. Results tend to be better than IrfanView.

The FastStone Editor

This is where FastStone excels. You can crop, zoom, pan, print, and save the capture in numerous formats, but before you do that you can also draw on the captured image. You don’t need to open screen captures in a photo-editor to add text labels, arrows, etc. You can do it all in FastStone when you capture the image. The screen capture below shows FastStone’s Quick Help page, on top of which I have added some text boxes, highlighting, shapes, arrows and lines.

Tips

To restore the default hot keys, close FastStone and delete the file “fsc.db” in the program folder. The next time you start FastStone, the defaults will be restored and a new copy of “fsc.db” will be created.

FastStone Image Viewer

Version 3.5

Like its sibling, FastStone Capture, FastStone Image Viewer has a beautifully designed interface, which is intuitive and easy to use. Like Google’s Picasa2, it can be used to browse the images on your hard drives, and like Irfan View it can be used to apply special effects, adjust colours, resize images, convert file types, etc. Picasa2 is better at creating thumbnails automatically, but FastStone offers more options for editing images.

FastStone offers a conventional Windows Explorer interface with directory tree and thumbnail panes. It also has a pane for a larger preview. The thumbnail browser window has an additional icon (the second of the two at top left) to minimize the window to a taskbar. In fullscreen mode, this taskbar is always on top, but since I have my Windows taskbar at the top of the screen on autohide, I don’t use this feature, I minimise it instead.

When you double-click on a thumbnail, the image is displayed without any toolbars cluttering the screen. The mouse cursor becomes a magnifying glass, which you can click to zoom in to the image, and drag to pan the zoomed image.

Move the mouse up to the top edge of the screen and a taskbar pops up for browsing to other images. On the left of the taskbar is a droplist, showing only the directories on your drive in which images are stored. On the right of the taskbar are icons for browsing and working with images, and below is a scrolling pane with thumbnails of the images in the current directory. Move the mouse back down, and the taskbar disappears. This saves time and reduces the risk of RSI.

Move the mouse over the left edge of the screen and another taskbar pops up for modifying the image.

Choose from many options to save the image in different formats, copy it to another directory or drive, show a slideshow, or edit the image in another program (any installed program can be added to the menu).

Rotate, flip, or resize the image using one of several resampling methods.

Change the canvas size or crop the image.

Open the Text Board for adding notes and labels to the image, just as you can in FastStone Capture.

Adjust the brightness, contrast, or gamma of the image. Modify Hue, Saturation, or Lightness; reduce the number of colours, sharpen or smooth the image with a Gaussian blur. Adjust tonal ranges using the Histogram.

Apply any of the many special effects to the image. Add a vignette or drop-shadow, remove red-eye, convert the image to greyscale or sepia.

Undo and redo any of the actions you have applied, before saving the modified image under a new name. If you browse to another image, you will be asked if you wish to save any of the changes that you have made, unless you have already saved it as a new image.

Mouse over the right of the window to show the image information taskbar. The top pane displays file information — filename, path, type, size, date/time, pixels and colour depth, and print size at the current resolution.

Digital camera users will find the EXIF details useful to display details of the camera settings in use when the picture was taken.

Since I don’t use a digital camera, I have added a JPEG comment to an image to show how the comment field can be used. This information is saved with the JPEG image and can be viewed in other programs such as Irfan View.

Mouse over the bottom edge of the window to display another taskbar. This has a collapsible navigator for panning large images, and tools like those on the top taskbar for browsing and managing images. The tools from the left taskbar for cropping, resizing, and adding text to images are also available.

  Bottom taskbar (left)

Bottom Taskbar (right)

FastStone Viewer Settings

The F12 function key will bring up the settings dialogue, where there are extensive options for configuring the image browser. The Thumbnail tab (illustrated) allows the user to define the size and layout for the thumbnails. Other tabs show options for the image viewer, the magnifier, JPG export quality, RAW Camera images, Dual monitors, Colour management, File Associations, Favourite directories, External programs for editing images, and the music to play during slideshows.

Conclusions:

What I like most about FastStone is the careful thought that has gone into the interface design. No unnecessary mouse-clicks means that your work-flow is not being constantly interrupted to respond to dialogues. For example, the zoom tool in fullscreen mode — one tool does it all. Click to zoom in, move the mouse to pan, release the mouse to return to fullscreen.

Although the program is very feature-rich, it is not at all hard to learn. One barely needs to open the one page help or the seven page “documentation.” Tooltips, clear icons, a choice of skins, and ergonomic design, ensure that new users will be up and running in a few hours, and fully conversant with the program within a week or two.