Screenshot Windows 10 With Paint

Sometimes just taking a screenshot of what’s on your Windows 10 PC screen and sending it over email or instant messenger to friends and family seems like a fast option to do. I’ve found an easy way on how to take a screenshot on Windows 10. Other ways just feel like too much of a hassle. They don’t have any built-in program that actually just takes a screenshot and saves it straight to an image file anywhere on your PC.

Since I’ve been working on ArtificialGeek.com as a hobby, hopefully, I have helped some people in one way or the other. If so please share or like my page, I would really appreciate it. But while I’ve been writing my “How-to” guides and tech tips, you may have noticed I have a lot of screenshots from what I’ve been doing. And honestly, the method I use seems to be the fastest and easiest around. But there are alternative programs you can install which do the exact same principle. But being a geek I like to minimize the applications installed on my system to keep it running at optimal performance.

Check out my guide on how to minimize programs on windows startup.

How To Take A Screenshot On Windows 10

First off, to screenshot Windows 10 open up the page or window that you want to take the screenshot of. Now on your keyboard, depending on what layout you have, you will see a key that says “prt sc” or something similar to indicate print screen. I know some laptops require you to hold an additional option key to access the 2nd command on the key.

Once you have pressed “prt sc” your Windows 10 machine will have taken a screenshot. Now we just need to save it as an image file. Like I mentioned before, what’s the point of installing third party software which could cripple your computer’s performance when you have a simple program already built into Windows 10 and it does the job perfectly. The application I’m talking about is Paint! I know, good old paint.

To open up paint, select “Start –> Windows Accessories –> Paint” or you can use Cortana to search “Paint” and select it from the menu.

Once Paint is open, we need to make the basic white canvas background as small as we want, so that when we paste our Windows 10 screenshot into Paint, that no white borders will be visible around it.

To do this, scroll down to the bottom right of the Paint canvas and using your mouse, drag the bottom right corner all the way to the top left corner, to create a small box. Best way I find to do this is to zoom out to 50% using the slider in the bottom right of paint.

Then now you can select the bottom right corner of the white canvas and slide it all the way up to the top left. Creating a small square box. Don’t worry once we paste the Windows 10 screenshot, it will be full size.

Should end up similar to the image below.

Now we just need to insert our screenshot by either selecting “Paste” in the top left. Or right-click on the white canvas and select paste.

Your screenshot should appear, now all we need to do is just save it as an image file.

Select “File –> Save As… –> Location of your choice”. (Be sure to set the file type to .JPG or .JPEG).

I do find using paint the easiest as I said, it also gives me the chance to select smaller parts of the screenshot and save them as image files, using the selection tool and copy & paste method. Give it a try and let me know what you think.