Capturing what’s on your desktop can be as simple as hitting the Print Screen key and pasting the contents of the clipboard into an image editing app. But you’ll notice that it is not possible to capture everything; the cursor cannot be included in grabs and many dialogs disappear when Print Screen is pressed. WinSnap is a powerful screen capture tool that includes a number of handy options, with the latest version bringing support for the capturing of native Aero shadows.

WinSnap is now able to capture the shadow that is added to windows and object by Windows, but in cases where this is not possible, post-capture shadowing can be added for you. Screen capturing has many purposes, but it is often used to highlight information. To make this easier, WinSnap includes a number of annotation tools that can be used to draw shapes and arrow on your grabs as well as adding text. To the same end, there are also a number of effects to choose from. If you want to highlight a particular area of a screen capture, you can opt to grey out the rest of the image, or blur it slightly.

WinSnap is a powerful image capture tool comparable with SnagIt

A number of different keyboard shortcuts can be created to allow for a variety of capture modes – full screen, active window, sizeable region, and various others. You can choose whether or not to include the cursor in your captures – while useful, this may not be an option you always want to use – and the ability to place a delay on captures means that it is possible to grab objects that would normally disappear when a hotkey was pressed.

To allow for more impressive presentation, there is an intelligent cropping mode available. This is particular useful when cropping screen captures that include Aero shadows as it means that shadows can be re-added at the edge of a crop to give a more professional finish. If you are using your captures in other programs, WinSnap preserves any areas that are transparent to eliminate the need to capture multiple versions of the same shot so you can piece something together. Add to this the ability to add watermarks, custom cursors that can be moved around as separate objects, and a decent price point, and you have yourself a very accomplished screen capture tool.

You can find out more and download a free trial of the app by paying a visit to the WinSnap review page.