MacMost Now 333: Screen Capture and Drawing with Skitch

Skitch is a free tool that can be used to capture your screen and then draw on the image. You can also start with a blank image, photo or any file. You can export the result or upload it to the Skitch Web site to share.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode lets have a look at Skitch. So in Episode 326, we took a look at two free-drawing programs for the Mac, well there's another one I want to talk about. Its called Skitch. And its really a screen capture tool, but it has some very powerful drawing tools inside of it, which makes it useful as a drawing tool as well. So after you download Skitch, and you run it, this is what you get. Its a very different look for a graphics program. It goes with the concept of this frame, wrapped around the image, and all of the tools are in the frame. Lets start by using it as a screen capture tool. We can use capture, and then a variety of ways to capture something. So for instance lets bring up, a browser window, switch to Skitch, and do capture using cross-hair. And then we go and capture a piece of the screen. Then we go back into Skitch and we can see that it has taken the captured area. We put it inside of the Skitch frame, as an image, and now we can edit. So the editing tools are your basic drawing tools, like pencil, line, circles and that sort of thing. And since its a screen capture tool primarily, you can use arrows to point things out very quickly and easily. You can also change the colors, and do a variety of other different things like draw text. So when you're done with the image you can save it in a variety of ways. You can set the image type here, you can set the variety of formats like JPEG and set the JPEG quality settings even. You can use a dragging tab to drag it to the finder, which is a very unique way of saving a file, you can also use save as and save it out. At the heart of Skitch is the Skitch website, see you have to sign up for the website in order to get the application. Once you do, in return you get this free space to upload images, and uploading from Skitch is very quick and easy. You can simply take a screen shot of something you want to show somebody, add a few arrows and text to it, and then press a button, and its at your Skitch account on the website, then you can share that location with somebody else. Its a lot quicker than say, exporting from another location, uploading to your own website and then showing them from there. There's also this handy idea of a history that you can save the current image to a history and view your history there and you can save many copies of the same document as you work on it and then choose which one to go to by clicking on it in history. Resizing and cropping works in a very unique way in Skitch to re-size you drag one of the corners of the frame, like that, its easy to undo. To crop you can drag the edges of the inside of a frame like this, and cropping works like that. Now instead of screen capture if you want to simply draw, you can create a new document inside of Skitch and it gives you a background and then you can draw on top of that and create your own images. In addition to doing that you can also go and grab images from your photo collection, from inside of I-photo and then it will show your I-photo library there, so right now Skitch is still officially in beta but its pretty robust. Go to Skitch.com to download it, and give it a try. Hope you find it useful. Till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

MacMost Now 333: Screen Capture and Drawing with Skitch

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