Taking a screenshot of your desktop or of the active window in Windows is as simple as pressing a certain key combination. Microsoft Snip adds basic annotation and sharing features to it, enhancements that more creative users will surely find to be insufficient. Ashampoo Snap, however, takes screen and video capture to the next level by offering more editing features and capture options, such as scrolling windows, menus, or freestyle regions.
If Ctrl+PrtScn is enough for you, you will find Ashampoo Snap to be, first, expensive, and then much too complicated. If, however, taking high-quality screenshots and creating annotated videos of your desktop action is part of your daily routine, this excellent app will turn this simple and sometimes repetitive task into a creative and rewarding activity. It allows you to capture, of course, still images of your desktop or a selected area; a scrolling window in Firefox, Chrome, and Edge; a freestyle, fixed, or free rectangle region; a menu, and a combination of objects and windows from your desktop. Likewise, the program captures video and uses an OCR engine to extract text from your images.
Ashampoo Snap can behave as the most unobtrusive app you can think of or take up all your desktop when opened in full-editing mode. Once installed, you will only see a small blue line on the top side of the screen – click on it and a discreet menu bar will open to offer you all the app’s main options (capture video, a screenshot, freestyle selection, etc.). As soon as you take a snapshot of your screen, however, Ashampoo Snap will launch in all its glory. You will be presented with the image you captured and a set of bars in three of the four sides of your screen with all kinds of editing, transforming, and saving features and functions.
Together with all these features (a list too long to reproduce here), Ashampoo Snap offers more output formats than any other of its competitors (up to 4K resolution), an improved OCR engine to capture text from your screenshots in various languages, advanced DPI settings, basic video editing tools (with live video editing options), and a very low usage of your system resources, even when recording video. All of this makes Ashampoo Snap is a serious contender worth trying if you happen to be looking for much more than just a simple way of capturing whatever happens on your screen.
v4.4 [Sep 14, 2011]
- All new video capture technique with new effects/options
- New cursor and zoom effects for video capture
- Support of more codecs/containers for video encoding
- Support of multi-monitor environments
- Pause the video recording
- Improved highlighting tool (more than one area)
- Objects, for example arrows, texts, shapes etc., are now editable
- High-quality objects (anti-aliasing etc.)
- Support of the Ashampoo Photo Commander format for import and export
- Stamps and graphics that can be added to screenshots
- Import/export of the whole application configurations in one INI file
- Send several screenshots as a single PDF file by e-mail
