You’ve probably read through so many tutorials and noticed all the screenshots being used. You may have also asked yourself how these screenshots were captured. With this tutorial you’ll find out how.
STEP ONE
With any design tutorial, you’ll have a specific program opened and being used. What you need is to capture what you’re doing as an image so that you can then place it on your tutorial page.
So for example, let’s say I’m doing a tutorial using Photoshop. I would have Photoshop open and prepare the first step of whatever design I’m working on. When I have my first step prepared, I hit Alt + Print Screen on my keyboard. This will copy your screen to memory.
I use Photoshop to crop my screenshots. So still in Photoshop, I hit Control + N to open a new document. Because you have your screenshot saved in memory, Photoshop will default in the size of your screenshot as the size of your new document. Click Ok. Then hit Control + V to paste in your screenshot:
STEP TWO
As you can see, the entire screen was captured. We don’t need all of that. I want to crop the image down to just include what I need. So using the Rectangular Marquee Tool, I click and drag around the area I need to crop out:
STEP THREE
Now go to Image > Crop. You should be left with everything inside the area you selected:
STEP FOUR
We could keep the image like that but I don’t like the gray area that’s still left so let’s get rid of that. Using the Magic Wand Tool, click anywhere in the gray area. All of the gray will get selected:
STEP FIVE
Now right click on the gray area and choose Select Inverse. This will select just the screenshot alone:
STEP SIX
Go to Image > Crop and you have yourself a nice screenshot to use on your tutorial page!
You may notice the top corners still have some gray showing. You can use the Magic Wand Tool to select the gray and then hit delete to get rid of the gray.
STEP SEVEN
Another method to creating screenshots is if we were to look back at step 4 where we used the Magic Wand Tool to select the gray area:
You could hit delete on the keyboard to get the following:
All you’d have to do now is get rid of the transparent pixels. Go to Image > Trim and choose the following:
And there you go, another way to create a nice screenshot for your tutorial page! Enjoy!
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