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I take a lot of screen shots. Sure, I could just hit the Print Screen button, but by using SnagIt, I can save myself a lot of time and
get just the shot I need. There are two types of screen shots that I like to take most often: area
shots that include a thin border, and area shots that don’t have a border so
they can more easily be slipped into a page without emphasizing the fact that
they are a screen shot.
I could continuously click on the border option to turn
it on and off, or I can add the border I need after I take the shot.
But since I know these are my two most common moves when using SnagIt, I’ve
created two custom Profiles. Custom Profiles make the job easier, because
I can pile up all the options I want and save them together...allowing me to then change my current default settings with one click.
As you can see below, within My Profiles I have saved two
profiles at this point. One is called Region With Borders and the other
is Region No Borders. At the moment, the default setting is the With
Borders profile, since that is the one with the blue shading around it (the
one currently selected).
To create a new profile in SnagIt 8, click the New
Profile button along the top border.
The New Profile dialog box opens. Here you can create a new
group, if needed. I want to save this to My Profiles, so I just highlight that
group. I type in a name for this profile, which I will call Region
w/TornPage. I could apply a special hotkey for this
Profile, but I prefer to use the default Print Screen button for all my shots.
I then just make a point of switching to the profile I need.
Now I can go into this Profile and make any
adjustments, such as actually adding the Torn Edge effect.
When I click on the Torn Edge effect, a dialog box appears
that allows me to play with all types of settings so I can customize the look
just the way I want it. The sample illustration will show me what will happen
to the image as I make the changes. This is great because, even if I don’t know what
a change might do, I can play with the buttons to see exactly what will
happen.
Once I am happy with my adjustments, I scroll down and click OK to accept
them.
You’ll notice that now my new profile displays with an
orange glow around it. That tells me that I made changes to this Profile, but
have not yet saved these changes. If this was a temporary change, I may
not wish to permanently save the modification to this Profile. But since these are
the changes I want, I move up to the top toolbar and click the Save Profile button. That will update this Profile and cause the glow to again turn to the
default (selected) blue glow.
(And as you can see in the above illustration, when I
selected that profile and took the screen shot, the image did, indeed, display
a Torn Edge and shadow effect.)
I can now take three different types of screen shots by just
clicking any of these Profiles…a Region With Borders, a Region Without
Borders or a Region with a Torn Edge.
Realize, however, that SnagIt comes with a bunch of predefined Profiles that cover the most
common types of shots users want to take, so you don’t need to create a profile for every move you need to make.
For example, if I wanted to take a Full Screen shot, I
can click that Profile and hit my default hotkey, which I’ve set to Print
Screen (and which is now the overall, default hotkey in SnagIt 8).
But I can also reorganize all the Profiles. This way, if there is
a predefined one that I use a lot, I can just move it up into My Profiles so it
is handy. And I also moved up the My Profiles group to the top, since they default at the bottom of
the Profile list. I prefer having my custom choices displayed first!
To organize your Profile list, just click the Organize
Profile button along the top. The Organize Profile dialog box opens.
Here you can make several modifications. You can move around
your groups, such as I did to get My Profiles to the top of the list. But you
can also adjust the Profiles themselves, such as selecting one and adding a
special Hotkey to it, renaming it or deleting it.
And although I haven’t had to test this theory yet...I have exported
my Profiles out to a saved file. Therefore, I’ll assume that, if I crash my computer
and need to reinstall SnagIt anew, I could just import my saved profile file, which would save time from having to recreate them over
again. Of course, this method will only work if you take the time to Export out
the current list before your computer goes belly up!
If you’re already saving time by using SnagIt 8, be sure to
take a few moments to investigate, create and organize a few custom Profiles so
you can save yourself even more work by having all your defaults set for you
with a simple click!
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