It’s not often that I use new software. Of course, new releases mean that I have to do so from time to time, but it’s fairly rare that I will actually use entirely new software – it’s just that I’m fairly set in what I use, and I barely have enough time to keep up with what I do now (no comments on posting frequency, please), so installing new software just to play doesn’t happen often.
But every once in a while, I will come across something that I need to do, and at that point, I have to find a tool that becomes a bit of a lesson in just how difficult it is to find something that works and works right to do the job. These days, it seems like everyone wants to put every bell and whistle possible into their applications. Witness the growth of software over the years to see what I mean. That’s why it’s a pleasure to find two simple applications that do their jobs – and do their jobs exceedingly well – that I’d like to tell you about: FastStone Capture and FastStone Photo Resizer.
FastStone Capture, as the name implies, allows you to take captures of the screen. If you are like me, you may be wondering just why you need such a tool – after all, Windows has built-in screen capture utilities that allow you to capture the active window or the entire desktop. Unfortunately, if you are one of the growing number who as joined the multi-monitor club in order to boost productivity (like Jeff, I have been a member of the three-monitor club for a while now), then this doesn’t always work.
Enter FastStone Capture. An unobtrusive tray icon sits, ever at-the-ready, so that you can click to bring up a tiny taskbar that allows you to capture not just the active window or the entire screen, but a rectangular or freehand region (that you can select, and it even includes a nifty screen magnifier to help make sure you select what you want) or even a scrolling window. What’s more, you can even assign hot-keys to the application, and then annotate what you capture or send it to another application for editing. Though it’s not the most highly-advertised feature in the program, there is even a color-picker feature that you can activate, which is the easiest way I’ve found to figure out what color is on-screen at any given time. Great for web development.
At $19.95 for a lifetime license, it’s well worth it.
FastStone Photo Resizer is another great utility that is, perhaps, not the most creatively named. Luckily for us, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work well. In fact, it works wonders. If you like to take pictures – even casually – and do just about anything with them, then this is simply a must-have utility.
The feature list really doesn’t do it justice – it lists the basics, such as converting and renaming photos in batch mode and supporting a variety of image formats (JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PNG, GIF), but it can also resize (by pixel or percentage), crop, change color depth, apply color effects, add text and watermark. You can rename rename images with sequential number, and even save your settings to a file for later.
As if this isn’t enough, the utility is free for home use. But frankly, for $19.95, it’s also quite the bargain, so check it out (both programs offer versions for download).
If you don’t need all the features, such as watermarking, then you may want to take a look at the FastStone Image Viewer. Also free for home users, it offers more of an image browser and management utility, while also offering many of the cropping and resizing features, without all the power of Photo Resizer. Also free for home use, it’s a bit pricier at $34.95 for others. But it’s a lot more powerful overall. It just depends on what you need.
Have some software that you can’t live without? Share it!