How do I 'print screen' on one device, when there are two attached?

[CrippsCorner]

Obviously there's not a 'print screen' button on the Type Cover, and I know how to do it by pressing the Windows button on the Surface and down in volume. However I have an external screen attached and when I do this it gives me a weird image of both screens together. You cannot simply Alt + 'print screen' as it doesn't register... any ideas? It's frustrating because the images appear much lower resolution as they actually are.

 

[beman39]

All computers do this, not just the Surface, I have 2 monitors on my gaming rig and when I take a screenshot/printscreen it takes both monitors, so all I do is open up photo editor and CUT the screen I want and open in another window which gives me the correct res and size and it won't look so weird aftwards

 

[oion]

I find I tend to miss the vol-down+haptic trick for printing screen on my Surface, so I use the keyboard trick Fn+Winkey+Spacebar instead.

At work on Windows machines, the print screen key does capture both monitors as well, so I just paste into my simple editor of choice (Irfanview) and crop there, or you can past into Word and crop there--basically, it needs to be cropped.

Or you can try the built-in Windows Snipping Tool: Use Snipping Tool to capture screen shots - Microsoft Windows Help

 

[Arizona Willie]

I have docked the Snipping Tool to my toolbar so it is always available in desktop mode.

 

[CrippsCorner]

I've tried cropping but the resolution quality drops significantly, okay for general screenshots but not when I'm doing things with photography. Thanks for the Snipping Tool tip though, I'll check that out later.

 

[oion]

I've tried cropping but the resolution quality drops significantly, okay for general screenshots but not when I'm doing things with photography. Thanks for the Snipping Tool tip though, I'll check that out later.

This probably has to do with the application you're using to do the crop (cropping in Word, for example, gives the worst quality AFAIK). Have you tried the built-in Paint? But snipping tool is quite good as well.

 

[CrippsCorner]

Okay actually I realise that was an incorrect way of describing what I did. I meant simply opening the picture that had been screenshot, it's all blocky. So I doubt cropping would make it better... (although yes I have tried with the Paint program, to no avail)

 

[Ruffles]

I have docked the Snipping Tool to my toolbar so it is always available in desktop mode.

This! I use the snipping tool all the time.

 

[oion]

Okay actually I realise that was an incorrect way of describing what I did. I meant simply opening the picture that had been screenshot, it's all blocky. So I doubt cropping would make it better... (although yes I have tried with the Paint program, to no avail)

So you're saying that opening the screenshot from the automatic pictures>screenshots library in any image viewer shows poor quality? What you're describing sounds like excessive compression artifacting, but I've never seen that from the raw print screen function before. I don't suppose you can post sample images of what you're seeing.

I don't know if the snipping tool will fix that, hopefully it would. (Did you try it yet?)

 

[CrippsCorner]

Had a go at trying to explain what's going on, I couldn't risk cutting a bit to upload in case it compressed it further, but I think this'll help slightly. What I've done is taken photos with my iPhone of what text looks like normally...



And then the same website when a print screen has been performed...



You can see the letters are quite jagged and seem to take up more pixels than they really do. I'm sorry that the first image is slightly blurred but for some reason it didn't want to focus properly that time.

 

[oion]

Uh, if that's the actual voucher number in there, you should remove it.....But you're offline.

But yes, that's quite the jagged appearance there. I'm assuming when viewing the screenshot in the viewer, it's at 100% zoom. Are you seeing the same thing between screenshot/snipping tool?

 

[CrippsCorner]

The voucher has expired now so don't worry about that.

Still not tried the snipping tool, sorry! Problem is I never actually go on the forum when I'm with my Surface... I need to remember to do that.