Cool Authoring Things You Can Do With Snagit for Lectora

Snagit® for Lectora significantly dials up the options for getting all sorts of professional illustration into your eLearning courses and, because the software is integrated into the Lectora Inspire environment, it makes everything faster and easier. Right off the bat you’ll find choices that make it easy to perform the screen capture you want:

• All-in-One Mode – Yellow crosshair bars let you pick what you want to capture: the entire screen, a region, or automatically detects if you are in a window with scroll bars and gives you buttons to use with a “scrolling capture.”
• Text Capture Mode – You can capture text from screens and edit the text with rich text controls in the Snagit editor. Once you are done you can copy and paste text into other documents.
• Video Capture Mode – Capture simple videos from your screen. Once you have captured a recording, you can play, stop and step through recordings, save a single frame as an image or save the entire video as an AVI file.
• Multiple Image Web Capture – Designate a web page and capture all the images and save them separately in a folder. Each separate image from the site can be opened and viewed in the library.

See more video demos here.

Editing Your CaptureOnce you have the image captured, there’s quite a range of options to jazz it up – and make it more informative. Add callouts and stamps or use the drawing tool to add arrows or other images. You have options for removing or hiding areas and adding borders and edge effects. Above, you can see what I achieved in a few moments. I went to the NASA Web site and took a screen capture, added two callouts with text and a stamp, used image style to get the turned up edge and drop shadow effects, then dragged and dropped it into Lectora Inspire.

• Callout Gallery – Choose from a variety of stylish vector images to add to your capture. With these images, you can add text, resize and stretch the image. Use tools to change outlines, fill colors and gradients, or add shadows and adjust transparency.
• Stamp Gallery – You also have the option of adding bitmap stamp images to your screen captures, a quick and easy way to add information to an illustration. The powerful thing about the stamp gallery is that you can add and manage your own images here.
• Delete, Remove or Hide – If there’s something in your capture you don’t want to show, select and blur the area or use the cut out tool that hides a portion of the capture and adds with torn paper edge effects. Or, you can simply outline and delete a part of your capture.
• Drawing Tool – Add arrows, lines, and shapes as part of your capture. Other tools include pen, fill, highlight and erase.
• Edge Options for Canvas – Add a professional, finished look to a selection or the entire canvas. Choose from drop shadow, torn, faded, wave, saw, shark tooth and beveled edge.
• Spotlight and Magnify Option – If you want to emphasize a part of your image and de-emphasize another, you can select a portion of the capture and modify it using a magnification, darkening or blurring effect.
• Capture Transparency - The canvas area behind an image can be saved as a transparent background so images look better when added to a larger image. Or, you can use the fill tool transparent color option to change one color to transparent.

Managing your captures in the Snagit LibraryEvery capture you take is automatically stored in the Snagit library. The window shows all the captures with the newest appearing at the top. If you want to go back and find something, you can sort and search by several categories. Use the search pane to filter by recent captures or by application. Once you find the ones you want, you can drag them to the open captures tray and begin editing them. This is a handy way of keeping track if you are managing large projects with lots of details and images.Moving Your Snagit Captures to LectoraTo quickly move your captures to a Lectora Inspire course, simply set up your Snagit capture profile to capture and save images to your computer’s clipboard. Select a page in your Lectora title, right-click and select Paste, and the image is inserted into your title. It’s that easy. If you want to edit your screen capture so you can add callouts, stamps or labels within the image, right-click the image and select Edit. The Snagit editor will automatically launch your image so you can begin making changes. Save your changes and the image is automatically updated in your Lectora title.Snagit for Lectora offers extensive capabilities for quickly creating more informative and interesting illustrations for eLearning course developers. I’ve just touched the surface with this overview. If you’d like to learn more, download a free 30-day trial of Lectora Inspire now.