Screenshot help

Anyone that can recommend me a screenshot app that has good extra features, for example drawing on images etc.

Not sure what exactly you're asking for. If it's just abour basic stuff, I use IrfanView not just as a viewer but also as a simple screenshot edit (arrows, circles, etc).
As for taking screenshots, it's either PrtScr or FRAPS, depends on the product. I'm avoiding F12 within Steam because Origin, uPlay, RSC and Galaxy don't contain the same feature and I'm kinda alergic to nonstandard keyboard mapping.
For example, if we all including devs agreed Esc is "go back", then Square Enix can shove off with their ports that force Backspace use for that function.

Yep, would also go for fraps to take the screenshot. (Screenshots out of games can easily be done via "Snipping Tool" which is pre-installed on Windows 10 btw).

Free software to edit it is plentyful:
Infranview as a great lightweight option, also to convert them, including batches.
Gimp is a free alternative to photoshop and sorts
Inkscape is also pretty good for certain work
Paint.net is another option.

I screenshot constantly and use FRAPS and really like it myself as it captures all the post-processing effects. I own a purchased version as it is super cheap.

For editing I am lucky to own PhotoShop but I know many really like GIMP which is free.

If you just want to draw circles around things and plop some text on the screen, Irfanview is the way to go. Paint.Net and GIMP are far more powerful but also far more complex.

joxer said:

As for taking screenshots, it's either PrtScr or FRAPS, depends on the product. I'm avoiding F12 within Steam because Origin, uPlay, RSC and Galaxy don't contain the same feature and I'm kinda alergic to nonstandard keyboard mapping.

Click to expand...

I hear that - but I ended up just making my own scheme long ago: F12 is for videos (currently Shadowplay) and F11 for screenshots. I've got it that way in FRAPS, Steam, and Shadowplay. Any half-decent screenshot utility is going to let you map those keys.

I just use Steam for screenshots (could use Shadowplay for that, too).

Now here's another question: JPG or PNG? I keep jumping back and forth. PNG is higher quality but, assuming you aren't cranking up compression on JPG, just barely higher quality. PNG uses far more disk space, too... but what's a couple of megabytes on today's hard drives?

I often use Fraps for within SWTOR. IrfanView is also nice, as a General tool, also for taking screenshots (dunno whether it works from within games).

Zloth said:

Now here's another question: JPG or PNG?…

Click to expand...

Just something everyone might like to keep in mind, when taking screenshots with FRAPS, while using the JPG format the quality will be garbage.

So basically if you want JPG convert your screenshot images to that afterwards, 90% quality is fine and still ends up worlds better than the FRAPS JPG junk.

For such batch image conversion there are many options, for example Faststone Image Viewer and XnView.

I always take screnshots as raw or if not possible then bitmaps.
For viewing, basic editing and format conversion I always use IrfanView.

I use IrfanView for large images (large as in over 20Kx20K) as it handles them well, and sometimes when I need more than three instances of image viewers open at the same time.

Otherwise I personally don't like it, the options, controls, settings, interface etc, it's just not well done on the usability side critiquing as a former developer, none of them are perfect but damn IrfanView can annoy.

Also the two I listed offer portable versions without having to trust a third-party for such option, which is great for someone just wanting to check something out to see if they like it, and portable versions are generally the better option.

For editing beyond crop/rotate/invert/resize I'd rather use GIMP or Paint.net.

I just use PNG rather than BMP as it supports lossless compression so quality isn't an issue and has more features than BMP.

Unfortunately if converting images to JPG, even at 100% quality, some colours still suffer, blue and red being good/obvious examples, so quality is always a tradeoff with it.

One image format I remember being really interested in is FLIF, haven't looked into it for I don't remember how long, but it seemed like it had a lot of potential especially for internet related things (which if I remember right Google was trying to do less impressively with their own image format, which unfortunately has a better chance of taking over being Google).

Stuff I don't care too much about - jpg, the ones I do - png