Within the last month I’ve been asked by three different people how to take a screenshot. I don’t know all that many people, so I figured that if that many of them don’t know how, maybe some of you don’t know how either. I’ll do my best to keep it simple. If you need clarification on anything, please leave a comment or email me, and I’ll see if I can’t make it more clear.

Everybody ready? Okay. Here we go!

1) Open up whatever graphics editing program you have on your computer. (I use Photoshop, but there are plenty of others.) If you don’t have a graphics editor, you should be able to use a text editor, like MS Word. (If it doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll help you find something that will.)

2) Make sure that whatever you are trying to capture is completely visible on the screen. (Move any windows that may be blocking part of it, and get your cursor out of the way, too.)

3a) If you’re using a Mac, you’ve got it easy. You’ll need to press three keys at the same time: shift-Apple-3. That’s it! You now have a picture of your entire screen, saved to your desktop for you.

3b) If you’re using a Windows machine, you have a bit more work ahead of you, but I promise it isn’t terribly difficult: Press your Print Screen (or Prnt Scrn, depending on your keyboard) button. It will probably seem like nothing has happened, but don’t worry!

4) Head on over to whatever program you opened in Step 1: See the File menu up at the top of your screen? Click it, and choose “New.” A box will pop up, with lots of options; we’re going to ignore all of them for now, and just click “OK.”

5) Now a blank document will open up. Don’t worry that it’s blank: it’s supposed to be right now; you’re going to paste your picture into it. There are two ways to do this:

6a) You can press two keys at the same time: Ctrl and the letter V. (Just a lowercase V; I only typed an uppercase because it’s easier to read.) OR:

6b) See the “Edit” menu at the top of the screen? If you click it, you can scroll down and select “Paste.” It does the same thing as Ctrl-V, so it doesn’t matter which you use. Some people like using the keyboard, some like the mouse, so try both, and do whatever is more comfortable for you

Almost done, I promise.

7) Now that you have your picture pasted, you’ll need to save it. Again, you can use the keyboard OR your mouse: you can press Ctrl-S, or you can go up into your “File” menu and select “Save.” Personally, I would type the name of whatever you are trying to get a picture of, so you can find it later — but you can call it whatever you want to, as long as you can remember it when you want to find it!

That’s it!

It won’t be the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, because the screenshot captures everything on your screen, but you WILL have a picture of whatever it was that you wanted a picture of. If you’d like to make it prettier, you’ll need to crop it, and that’s a lesson for another time. (If you need to know how soon, leave a comment or send me an email, and I’ll get a lesson up for you, pronto.)
Hope that helps! : )