PC Basics 002
Screen Capture Made Easy
AusWoody.
Edited and Proofed by Brandybee
How to take a picture of your Screen or Avatar to Post or PM.
1. Open an account with photobucket. Its free and ideal for this purpose. - photobucket.com. I’d advise to use your forum username and remember an easy password. You will need to provide an email too. Use you game email.
2. Make a new folder in your “Pictures” on your PC. To do this, find or search for your “ Pictures” Open it up and in a vacant space, right click to bring up a menu. Click on “New” “Folder” and name it “Forum Edited Picture's” or something you can easily remember. Then close that down.
3. Most PC's have windows paint but you can also download for free “Gimp” and / or “Bandicam.
4 If you have Windows 8 - On the App screen (which is the one with the tiles), near the bottom of the screen there should be an arrow in a circle. Click that. That should change your screen to the Apps by name screen.
5. In the top right corner there is a search box. (Its in the top right corner on mine). In that box type PAINT. This should bring up the Windows Paint programme on your PC.
6. Click on That and it should open your Paint program.
Lets have a quick lesson.
7. Minimise Paint, but leave it running. Then open AChat. You don't have to log in, just let it load or you can log in and room. Once AChat is loaded:
8. Take a screenshot - if in a room, turn the camera till you find the right view you want, then press the "Print" button on your keyboard (or "stamp", depend where you live!). Usually it's placed near the "F12" button. It also can have “prt sc” on it
Take a screen shot of the AChat page.
9. Bring your paint programme back up by clicking on the paint icon at the bottom of the page. Try pasting that into Paint. (I use CTRL + V keys to paste)
10. At the top of the Paint page you should see Crop. Click on that to crop the image so it includes only what you want. Drag the window for the selection you want and click on Crop again. If you mess up, there is an undo arrow at the top of the screen. This takes some practice, but don’t give up. Use the square or rectangle and start at the left top edge, drag it around. You will find your own best practice and as you get better, you can practice with the other crop shapes if you want.
11. Click on the cropped picturer, it gets rid of the part of the picture you don’t want.
12. Then use SAVE AS in File on the top bar, to save it. But save it in JPEG (JPEG uses less Kb's than the default PNG). Just remember where you saved it to. I would probably save it to Forum Edited Picture folder, you made earlier.
13 – If you want to upload a picture to Achat Game - login in the AChat main web page and, in the right corner of the screen under "Buy A$" you will find "Character picture upload": hit it and follow the instructions that appear. Be sure you have 99 A$, cause it costs to upload personal pictures.
14. Go to Photobucket. Click on "Upload" and then " Choose photo or video" Follow the instructions for it to upload.
15. On the right click on "Direct " to copy the URL for your picture.
16. Paste it in your Forum " Message " or " Reply" box. The URL will appear.
17. Then high light it (Holding left button down on your mouse and dragging across )
18. Above the smiley faces above is a square box " insert image" ( 2nd one from the left),
19 . Click on that, it will bracket the URL for you
20. Then preview, using the preview button below the typing box. The picture should come up above this section. Check its looks right and not too large. If its not, try again
21. Then send / post it. Practice . You just learnt a new skill
It can occur a picture can be to large and it doesn't fit in the post window (maximum width is 800). you can resize it without modifying it off-line.
To do it, just have to add this simple code: width=200
converting this
(img]link of the picture[/img)
to this
(img width=200]link of the picture[/img)
where 200 is the size you want to set. I can give a hint: for room example, a good size is from 700.
Stay tuned for further enlightenment from the above authors
AChat Forum
