FastStone Capture is an effective and easy-to-use screen capture program you can use to create a variety of projects such as training videos, software tutorials and user manuals. The program comes with image and video editing tools that polish your screen captures or recordings before publishing them.

With FastStone, you can choose to capture the full screen, an active window, objects, a rectangular region or a freehand region. With this variety of options, you can capture your entire screen, just a small window or anything in between. The program can take a scrolling capture, creating a snapshot of the entire content of a webpage, even if part of it is hidden and requires scrolling to view. You can record video of your screen, and even capture videogame footage.

Once you’ve captured an image or video, the FastStone editor opens automatically. Here you have a basic array of tools that let you draw, highlight, magnify and annotate images. You also have the ability to resize an image, adjust color values, lighting and more.

This program is one of four we reviewed that capture video. However, the editing tool is difficult to figure out and can only trim away unwanted footage. Additionally, you can only record videos and export in the WMV format. While this is a very popular video format, support for MP4 and AVI formats would give you more options for the use of your final products.

FastStone creates small file sizes for both images and video files. This is an important consideration, especially if you need to create a large number of files for work and want to save space on your hard drive.

This program is slightly more system intensive than higher-ranked software, but not by a noticeable margin. This means that you can take snapshots or record video of your screen without slowing down your computer, which is important if you want to capture quality videos that don’t lag.

FastStone saves image captures in a number of different formats, which is preferable as some file formats are better for specific situations. For example, you can save images in the JPG format, which are great for uploading images online. You also save them in PNG format, which is a lossless format, meaning the files can be resized without losing image quality, though they tend to be quite large. You can also create PDF files, which are great for capturing documents because text appears sharp and clear.

FastStone Capture provides an impressive 30-day trial period to test the software. Beyond that, program support lacks in major ways. It does not offer a FAQs page, and there aren’t any tutorials to walk you through the program step by step. However, you can reach customer support through email if you run into problems. FastStone does not offer phone support.

FastStone Capture is an easy-to-use screen recording program to create any number of projects. Once you capture images or video of your screen, the program’s editing tools make professional-looking products. It does offer an impressive 30-day trial, allowing you to use and test the program before you buy it.