Fireshot, estensione per catturare screenshot

Fireshot è una stensione per il browser Mozilla Firefox che consente di catturare screenshot delle pagine Web in cui ci si trova.

Questo plug in fornisce anche una serie di strumenti per modificare l\'immagine acquisita, inserire del testo e molto altro.

Basato su un programma shareware, Fireshot aggiunge una piccola icona raffigurante una S alla toolbar, con un pratico menù a discesa che permette di scegliere se scattare un’istantanea dell’area visible dello schermo oppure dell’intera pagina se vogliamo “fotografare” ad esempio una completa pagina web. Lo screenshot potrà fra diverse opzioni essere inviato direttamente via email, copiato negli appunti per essere immediatamente incollato in un’altra applicazione - ad esempio in Word scegliendo dal menù “incolla” - , salvato direttamente in una cartella oppure personalizzato in un vero e proprio editor grafico integrato. Per scegliere quest’ultima opzione, cliccheremo su “edit” e avremo a disposizione:

1. utili callout e vari tools per aggiungere del testo o evidenziare qualche particolare elemento della foto (select, drawing, pointer e text)
2. la possibilità di cliccare sulla foto ed evidenziarne un riquadro semplicemente cliccando col tasto sinistro del mouse
3. tantissimi comandi visualizzati in un vero e proprio secondo menù di editing per personalizzare l’area selezionata ritagliandola, isolandone una parte a colori lasciando il resto della foto in bianco e nero o rendendolo illeggibile, inserendo numeri o etichette colorate, e tanto altro ancora

Fireshot ci dà infine anche la possibilità di personalizzare ulteriormente l’istantanea tramite il nostro abituale editor fotografico tramite il comando “open in external editor“. Le schermate verranno inviate automaticamente al Paint di Microsoft, ma se usiamo altri programmi di editing, basterà impostarli scegliendo questo percorso: “Preferences > Editor > Press to open editor settings > Editor”, e poi cercare il file del nostro editor grafico abituale alla voce “Specify external editor“. L’opzione “General”, invece, ci consente di selezionare in quale formato immagine salvare lo screenshot scegliendo fra jpeg, png e bmp.

FireShot Features

Screen Capture modes:

• Capturing entire web page : Captures whole web page and displays it in editor.
• Capturing visible area : Capturing your foreground window.
• Capturing a region : Before capturing, an editor is displayed and a crop tool could be used to obtain desired region.

Selection tools:

• Area selection tool: provides rectangular and elliptic selection creation for further graphical processing.

Graphical tools which work with selections:

• Crop tool: cuts off everything that is outside of the selection. This tool is useful when you want totally exclude something from your screenshot.
• Fill tool: fills selection with specified color. You may use Color Picker to select a color from the captured screen. This tool is useful when you want totally exclude something from your screenshot.
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• Gaussian blur tool: blurs selection so that it’s impossible to say 100% what you see. This tool is useful when you don’t want totally remove something; you just need to make it non-readable.
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• Grayscale tool: converts colors inside selection to grayscale. This tool is useful when you want to send something to background as minor content.
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• Color Inversion tool: inverts colors inside selection. This tool is suitable for highlighting.
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• Glowing edges tool: creates glowing edges around selection. This is very spectacular tool to attract somebody’s attention to one or few details at your screenshot.
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• Interlace tool: interlaces selection. This tool is useful when you want to mark something as minor content.
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A combination of these effects can be applied to the image to get more illustrative result. Following screenshot shows Gaussian blur, Grayscale and Glowing edges effects sequentally applied to picture.
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Vector instruments:

Vector instruments have been developed to help user quickly and effectively annotate captured screens. They’re placed in separate layer and can be modified/removed at any time.

• Text and Shape tool: allows you to highlight desired fragment using Rectangular or Elliptical shape and annotate it. This tool is useful when you want to apply annotation to the fragment of your screen and you want to specify boundaries of this annotation.
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• Text and Freeform Drawing tool: allows you to create freeform drawings and attaching text messages to them. Useful when you want to create original objects.
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• Text and Line tool: allows creating a pointer supplied with text description. Useful when you want to quickly point at something.
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• Text tool: provides text box for simple annotation addition. It is useful when you want to simply leave a comment.
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How can screenshots be stored:

• PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format: provides lossless way to store graphical data. In addition, PNG structure allows saving additional user-defined information. This feature is used for storing vector objects and other editor info inside PNG.
  
• JPEG (Joint Picture Expert Group) format creates mostly less file size, but worse picture quality than PNG does.
  
• BMP (Bitmap Picture) format creates good quality picture, but its size is bigger than PNG and JPEG practically.
  
• ZIP file: all program output described earlier can be put to ZIP. This can dramatically reduce output file size.

Where screenshots can be created by Screenshot Studio:

• Screen Captures can be saved to disk.
• Screen Captures can be copied to clipboard.
• Screen Captures can be sent by e-mail.
• Screen Captures can be opened in another editor.

Serious web page captures with FireShot