Tip: Screen captures in Windows 10

Everyone knows these days that you can use the PrntScr key in Windows to capture a screenshot to the clipboard. This could be pasted into Paint (or other image editing tools) for editing or even directly into documents.

But, did you know that in Windows 10, there is a tool to capture selected areas of the screen similar to third party screen capture tools such as Greenshot.

The key combination is : WinKey + Shift + S

You’ll get a darkened version of the current screen and by default will be able to drag and select a portion of the screen to capture. It looks like this.

Medium homepage with the Windows Snip tool active

You can also (weirdly) do freehand selection to select weird and wonderful shapes.

Medium homepage captured using the freeform select in the windows snip tool.

For a long time I’ve used third party tools to capture portions of the screen when needed because I wasn’t aware that Windows had this option built in. I recently discovered it and thought that you might be interested to know about it as well.