Lightshot

Modern day activities more or less require you to spend considerable amounts of time in front of the computer, thus making the desktop your own personal virtual space. A lot can happen, and you might want to share activities with others. A simple method is to use the keyboard button to capture the entire screen, but the whole process can be lengthy until generating the image, and this is where specialized applications such as Lightshot come in handy.

With the setup taking little of your time, you're free to run it and see what it's all about. In fact, it takes the liberty of automatically starting, conveniently hiding in the system tray, letting you know it's there and how to use it through a small tooltip.

There's no main window to work with. Functions and options are cleverly simplified, creating a neat experience. You quickly notice this from the moment you hit the print screen button on your keyboard. The desktop automatically gets covered in a transparent, tint layer, requiring you to select an area of interest.

Don't worry about precision, because releasing the mouse button is only the start. As soon as the area selection is done, clever and intuitive controls are placed on the side and bottom, with helpful tooltips upon mouse hover so you don't get stuck along the way.

The area is only under a rectangle shape, but there are different tools that tip the scales in the application's favor. In other words, your selection is now a canvas on which you are free to draw different shapes, lines, freehand lines, transparent marker, as well as text. Different colors can be used for elements, even in the same image selection.

Coverage area is fitted with size specifications to easily grab custom size panels, with the possibility to further drag borders around and even move the whole box around your desktop. Saving is done under popular formats like JPG, PNG, and BMP. A faster overall process is to hit the print screen key along with Shift and have images automatically saved to an indicated location.

In case you want to share captured images, the application skips you the whole effort of using a web browser and manually selecting the image. Apart from editing tools, an impressive array of sharing options are made available at a mouse click away.

Popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, VK, and Pinterest are a few choices, given you have corresponding accounts. Moreover, you can use a built-in tool to search for similar images online using Google, directly print out, or upload on the application's own dedicated online image service (Prntscr.com).

Bottom line is that Lightshot is one of the tools you might want to keep around, be it for gaming, testing, or simply sharing random activities that take place on your desktop. It's lack of an interface keeps everything simple, while the clever implementation of different drawing tools and quick sharing options on various, popular social networks make it definitely worth a try.