MutleysHangar.com +
by John Allard
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Back to Basics is a regular monthly feature in the Ocala Flight Sim Club newsletter, the Gosport. B2B first appeared in the April 2011 issue and is ongoing. This article is from that series, re-posted here.
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We’ve all seen screenshots taken within Flight Simulator, in the magazines, on the forums or at least right here in the Gosport. If you’re a newcomer to FS, perhaps you’ve wondered how that is done.
I learn something new from almost every article I write – this one is no exception. Here’s the new pearl of wisdom this time around.
If you’re an FSX user, there’s probably little reason for you to read any further.
For the rest of us, in Flight Simulator 2004 (FS9), and really anywhere in Windows, simply pressing the Prnt-Scrn button, un-modified by Shift, Alternate or Control keys, will put an image of the screen on the Windows clipboard. The Windows clipboard can be thought of as a pad of electronic scratch paper that the operating system uses to temporarily store something. It’s volatile, meaning that it will go away if the machine is shut off and will be overwritten without so much as a whimper if something else is put on the Clipboard, regardless how large or small. The clipboard is the same unseen place in Windows where a file or an image or a snippet of text goes if you Select (highlight) and Copy in Windows. Any Select and Copy or Cut operation overwrites the current contents of the clipboard with the new object. There are a few exceptions but they are beyond the scope of this article.
The important point to take away here is that an image of what’s currently on the screen can be placed on the clipboard with a single Prnt-Scrn key-press, but that the clipboard contents are vulnerable to being overwritten unless subsequently saved to a named file.
In Flight Simulator, unless a dedicated screenshot utility is being used (more below on that), you must pause FS, click out of it and make a proper file of what’s on the clipboard before you can take another. While that may be unwieldy if you wish to capture a couple of dozen images from FS, for ones and twos and ad hoc situations where you didn’t expect to need a screenshot but a target of opportunity arises, it works fine. No advance preparation is needed; no other utilities need to be running. Press the key – capture the screen.
Manual Screen Shot Process
Lets say you’re cruising along and the sunset is doing great things with the clouds and the mountains, or you’re on short final and a Doctor in a Bonanza taxis out on the runway in front of you. It takes no more to capture the artistic venue or the evidence shot for the post-accident hearing to the clipboard than a single press of that Prnt Scrn key.
Remember, however, that each time you press the Prnt-Scrn key a new image is captured and the old one on the clipboard is discarded by the Operating System. If you didn’t paste it somewhere before it was replaced in the Windows clipboard, it’s gone forever.
How do you rescue your screenshot from the clipboard? Good question. Once an image is on the clipboard, at a later time of your own choosing, it is necessary to click or Alt-Tab out of Flight Sim and do a paste (CTRL-V or from a menu) into any program that is capable of accepting an image file, e.g. MS Word, etc. In my case I often use Paint.Net, a freeware graphics editor that is reasonably powerful and easy to use. It can be done in any program that will accept an image from a Paste operation in Windows.
Once pasted into another program that is capable of displaying and using the image, the picture can be saved, with or without editing, as a named file to wherever you choose to put it. Most programs will allow you to pick one of several image file types. JPEG (file extension = jpg) is probably the most common and the best way to go; it is certainly one of the most economical of disk space.
There are several freeware utilities available to save you all that convoluted pasting and saving business. They let you repeatedly press the Prnt-Scrn button to take screenshots. They will automatically paste and save the screenshots for you as you take them, much like the native screenshot capability of FSX. The most commonly used one and the one I know the most about is called Snapper. Snapper actually has some features that the FSX utility does not offer, including the ability to specify a filename prefix and a save location and has options for a shutter noise, mouse initiation instead of a key-press, half-size saves, and a couple of options for FS location in various formats to be imprinted on the image. You must load Snapper for it to be active, but if it is, you can fly around in FS and press the Prnt-Scrn key as often as you like. It will grab and save them all for you. You can find a free download of Snapper here.
http://www.michielovertoom.com/software/snapper/
So, now that you all know how, I’m sure you will be flooding Gosport Editor Steve Austin’s e-mail box with some fantastic photos of your FS adventures, right? That wouldn’t be a bad thing. Don’t forget too that Mutley’s Hangar has a monthly screenshot contest sponsored by Just Flight, with free software as prizes. What have you got to lose – start snapping.
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This regular monthly feature will focus on some of the more basic topics of Flight Sim flying. Suggestions for topics are appreciated – e-mail John Allard at allardjd@earthlink.net
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