DPCUC OFFICIAL LOGO August 2009
Featured Software
August 2009

Submitted by
Dan Delong


PicPick – screen capture and editor, plus, plus, plus

I thought MWSnap (June’s 2009 Featured Software pick) was the best free screen capture tool. Nope! PicPick is better. Not surprising, since MWSnap was created in 2002. PicPick borrowed many features from MWSnap.

PicPick, while not identical in its capturing and editing features to MWSnap, matches almost all of them in a more easily accessed user interface. And, PicPick adds many more features from inside its own image editor window (similar to MSPaint). Like:

  • Adjust brightness and contrast (all or just the selection)
  • Add effects, along with text, boxes, arrows, backgrounds and transparency
  • Resize image, or canvas, or a selection
  • Cut, copy, paste from clipboard, and insert image (resize it and change transparency)
  • Erase, fill, paint, colour picker, and pixel ruler
  • Freehand or irregular selection, with resizing and effects only on the selected area
  • Crop to selection or save selection
  • Send to FTP or other applications (including other image editors)
  • Multiple captures held in individual tabs
  • Auto-saved files are date stamped

What’s the same between MWSnap and PicPick?

  • Both run as standalone programs (even from a USB key – no install needed)
  • Magnifier during mouse selection for greater precision
  • Flip and rotate
  • Repeat last capture
  • Set a default capture size, file type and saving location
  • Hot-keys are user configurable
  • Send capture automatically to saving location
  • All save in GIF, PNG, BMP and JPG (but, MWSnap does TIFF and ICO)
  • Frames and borders (includes drop shadow)
  • Paste from the Windows clipboard
  • Cursor included with image (but MWSnap allows choice of cursors)
  • Both can capture a fixed sized and positioned rectangle, but MWSnap builds a library of used sizes

Since both of these programs remove their user interface from the screen during a capture, I had to use MWSnap to capture PicPick, and visa versa. It should be noted that the "/resources/frame/" folder contains an ini file and a png image for each type of frame. Both look simple enough for users to make their own frame styles (much like CSS layers).

Voidtools Logo
Above is the PicPick user interface, containing a marked- up screen capture from the Web – all editing was done inside this PicPick Image Editor.

Sample Search
Above is a screen capture showing the fly-out menus when right-clicking on the system tray icon for PicPick. The yellow coloured border, and the shaded frame, were both added by PicPick, before saving the image. A colour picker was used to match the border colour (and text colour) with that of the highlighted menu items in this capture.

Options - general

Above is a capture of the user interface for MWSnap, containing a similar web page capture to PicPick (earlier). MWSnap can add interesting borders and frames, different from PicPick’s. However, PicPick would be able to perk up the brightness and contrast in the photo, whereas MWSnap needs to hand-off such a job to another editor.



System requirements:

Platform: Windows 2000 / XP / Vista (includes 64 bit)

Version: 2.0.3 (July 2009)

Price: free

Language: English and many others

Download Size: 955 KB for zip file

Installed Size: 2.37 MB

Rating:

Download Site: here



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