Using Stamps in SnagIt

by Geetesh Bajaj , May 15th 2006

Stamps in SnagIt are my current fascination. I love the way TechSmith has implemented them in the program, and how intuitive they are to use. Yet, I had hardly used this amazing feature all these years, considering they have been part of SnagIt since version 6?

So what woke me up to them? Simple--TechSmith had free stamps available for download from their site and those cute graphics on their site looked so good that I knew I had to try this one. So I downloaded the free stamps, and installed them into my copy of SnagIt.

To begin, you need to take a screenshot with SnagIt--I snagged a screenshot of the Indezine.com homepage and sent it to the SnagIt Capture Preview (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The SnagIt Capture Preview window.

Next, in the Tools palette of the Paint area, select the Stamps tool. This will activate the Stamps Properties area just below the Tools palette, as you can see in Figure 2. Select the Stamps category you want, and click the Stamp preview area to open a fly-out menu that shows the stamps available in that category.

Figure 2: SnagIt Stamp Categories and Previews.

Choose one on the various categories (I chose Numbers-large), and then select the stamp you want (I chose the number 1). And then just click anywhere on your capture! It's that simple - see Figure 3 for how it looks.

Figure 3: See how the stamped capture looks.

Of course, you have so many more options. By default, SnagIt puts a nice drop shadow for each stamp, but you can opt not to have drop shadows. And you can even have transparent stamps--for example, you can place a stamp that's just 50% transparent so that the area under the stamp is also visible (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: That's a semi-transparent stamp with no drop shadow.

It's so much fun using these stamps--and it's so practical if you want to stamp number digits all over your captures and then explain why you placed each number in a particular place.

Moving Ahead

Do remember that you can find more stamps on the TechSmith site--these can also be downloaded from inside the SnagIt interface. To do that, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you are in the SnagIt Capture Preview window that you saw earlier in Figure 1.
   
   
2. In the Tools palette of the Paint area, select the Stamps tool. This will activate the Stamps Properties area just below the Tools palette, as you can see in Figure 2.
   
   
3. In the category dropdown list, the last option is Download more --choose this option and you'll be taken staright to the stamps page on the TechSmith site from where you can download more stamps.

Also you can create your own stamps and create/reorganize stamp categories--this is something that I'll cover in a subsequent tutorial.

Thanks to Betsy Weber of TechSmith for coordinating with me for this tutorial.

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