FastStone Capture

FastStone Capture is a super convenient tool, as it allows to get in one single build a screen capture, an annotator, and an editor, plus a screen and a sound recorder, photo editor, with extensive file format support.

The program allows you to manually select the recording area, ignore the taskbar, or focus on a specific region. Adding audio recording is optional, and when enabled, you can select the desired source, or select more sources at once (e.g. microphone and speakers).

Of course, there are other elements you can hide/show throughout the video recording session, elements such as the mouse pointer, mouse click(s) highlights, etc. The app allows using custom shortcuts for pausing the video and zooming in and out of the scene, and you can also set up your recording notifications based on visual guidelines or sounds (e.g. when recording, add a green thin/normal-sized, blinking border for the recorded area).

The app is perfect for users who want to create walkthrough guides/manuals, for teachers and students, for office usage, and even for designing nice personal projects or presentations. Among FastStone Capture's features, you can also find color pickers for color precision, multi-file merging or converting (to PDF) options, watermark manager and editor, or specific color reduction methods, based on the number of bits (e.g. image with 256 colors - 8 bits, 16 colors - 4 bits, and down to 2 colors - 1 bit).

One of the tool's most valuable options is the full hotkey customization (which allows setting up the environment fast), alongside the FTP server connection, for pushing content to a server.

FastStone Capture is a lightweight and easy-to-use application. The tool supports all well-known image formats, has a bunch of useful editing features, allows managing watermarks and page/image merging. It lets you send files straight to OneNote, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or to the web (via FTP), and lets you easily record the screen and annotate your screen captures.