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There's no denying the usefulness of a screenshot. An image captured from your screen can be used on your blog or website, you can stick it in a document, or any of a zillion and one other uses. There are lots of tools that let you grab an image or a region on your screen and save it. But they all behave pretty much the same: save the screen to your system clipboard, save a region to a file, that sort of thing.

ZScreen does the whole screen capture thing just like all the rest of them, but that's where the similarity ends. Sure, you can use it to stick an image on your clipboard or save it to a generic file, but how about pushing it to another app? Or maybe FTP-ing it to your web server? Most of the others can't do that kind of stuff. It's also got a built-in editor, so you can add annotations and watermarks, crop your captured images, and more. You can even choose the hotkeys to use to activate it, so you aren't stuck with somebody else's idea of an intuitive keystroke combination.

You can grab ZScreen for free; it's a Windows application.

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Building a website requires that you exercise several different skills. There's content to fill the site—otherwise who will come to visit? You need to be technically-savvy, or else your site won't function correctly. And then there's that whole design thing: if your site isn't pretty—or at least not ugly—you're not going to be able to get the word out either. For now, you're on you own for the first two items here, but when it comes to design, we've got a tool that might be helpful.

Color Set is an application that lets you plan out the color scheme you want to use for your site. Rather than building your site and having to go back again and again tweaking colors, you can see which hues go well together here. While it doesn't present a mock-up of your site or anything that fancy, what it does do is let you check out and tweak the colors you use for your text, table borders, background, and other elements. You can work with a browser-safe palette, or venture out on your own by specifying colors you want to try. Once you get things set just right, you can save your handiwork to "favorites", or as ready-to-paste HTML code.

You can download Color Set for free. It's a Windows application and should run on any Win32 platform from Windows 95 on up.

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Paper or plastic? Edward or Jacob? Raster or vector? While the high-tech world doesn't necessarily speak to the first two pairs, the choice between digital images can make a big difference. Especially if you've got the wrong one.

Paint programs, like Photoshop, basically record the color and position of each and every pixel in an image. While that's handy for photos and pix on websites, if you need to do some serious work with your images, it's not necessarily your best bet. Vector images, like you might find in Illustrator, are the ones that your electronic drafting application wants to work with. So if you have an image you want to scan—maybe a drawing you want to modify in AutoCAD—you're out of luck.

WinTopo takes your bitmap image—BMP, TIF, JPEG, GIF, PNG—and converts it into any of several vector formats. Now you can use your drawing program to make edits. And remember, one of the great things about vector images is that you can enlarge or reduce them with no loss of image quality.

You can grab the freeware version of WinTopo for, ummm, free and run it on your Windows system. They've also got a professional version if you're interested, but that's going to cost you.

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Whether you upload a few images or a lot, you probably need to fiddle with them before you put them out there for the world to see. If you're doing some complicated stuff, you may need to get out the big guns and fire up Photoshop, but if you're only applying a tweak here and a nudge there, that may be overkill. That's when it's handy to have a tool like RIOT.

RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool) is an image optimizer that lets you adjust your pictures and see the results in real time. Built with a two-paned before- and after window, you can easily compare your original image with the newly optimized picture. That way you can choose the adjustments that do the most for you in terms of shrinking the file size without making your picture look just nasty. Mess around with brightness, contrast, color depth, and more. It supports oodles of popular (and even some not-so-popular) image formats, and gives your choice of industry-standard, GIF, JPG, and PNG files as your output.

You can download your copy of RIOT for free. It's a Windows app and should be right at home on systems running Windows 2000 or later.

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The ability of take a screenshot is important to just about anyone who does serious work on a computer. Whether you're a blogger who wants to quote (visually) an image or another site you've visited, or a software designer who needs to document some tweak you've made in the UI of your latest creation, it's important to be able to grab that image. Most systems have the built-in ability to do this kind of thing, but as is often the case, the out-of-the-box solution is pretty weak and doesn't really cover all your image-capturing needs. Enter the third-party after-market solution.

One way that solution may look is a lot like Greenshot. This tool lets you grab an individual program window or a whole-screen image, like just about everybody else, but then it adds some extra functionality. You can also capture part of a screen, for example, by marking the bounds of what you want to grab and then snapping that region. In addition, you can go in to your newly-selected image and make edits, annotations, and more. Insert rectangles or ellipses, or even a textbox. Now instead of having to choose between just text or just picture (it's worth a thousand words, you know), you can have both.

Greenshot is a Windows application. It comes both with- and without an installer, presumably allowing you to install it easily on your system or to a removable drive.

Download Greenshot

Have you ever taken a bad photo? We're not talking about pictures of questionable taste here; rather, those photos where you really can't tell what it's a picture of. There's the ever-popular demonic red eye shot that you can fix with Photoshop or GIMP, but what about those images you snapped just as you sneezed, or when the yellow-bellied sapsucker you were zeroing in on decided to fly off? That's not such an easy fix.

Unshake is a tool that can help you salvage those photos. While your results may vary, if you fiddle with it enough, you may get something useful out the other end. There's not tons of documentation, so you'll need to play with it a while to see which settings do what. And of course, it's never a bad idea to work on a copy rather than the only version of the image in question.

Unshake is a Java app, so you should be able to run it on any Linux, Mac, or Windows machine that has the appropriate Java runtime installed. It's free for personal use.

Download Unshake

How far is it from here to there? In the real world, you'd answer this question with a ruler or yardstick. But what about on your computer display? How far is far? It kind of depends on the screen resolution and all that. You're probably going to have better luck measuring pixels than you are looking at inches or centimeters.

JR Screen Ruler is a tool that can help you check out sizes of objects and distances between objects on your screen. It defaults to pixels (although it can display other units as well), and can easily be dragged around the screen to position it. A quick click will rotate it from horizontal to vertical orientation, and a slide control lets you tweak the length of your on-screen ruler. You can also play with color, transparency, and more, so that the tool will be most helpful to you.

A free download, JR Screen Ruler is a Windows Application. It should be right at home on any Win32 platform, from Windows 95 on up.

Download JR Screen Ruler

We all know that PDFs are handy things to have. You can use them to share information with others. They're cross-platform, so if you're on a Windows machine, you can still share with Mac and Linux users, or any other combination of those. And since Acrobat Reader and many other PDF reader apps are free, cost in no object there either.

There are a number of different ways to create PDFs, some involving expensive tools, and others for free. Among the free entries here are plugins and printer drivers for use with apps like Word and its ilk. But what if, instead of text, you need to create PDFs from images instead? Your options may be more limited.

i2pdf (Image to PDF) is a free tool you can use to convert your pictures into full-blown PDF files. It's got a simple drag-and-drop interface, so it's pretty easy to convert your JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, and GIF files. And you get to choose compression, thumbnail info and more.

A free download, i2pdf runs under Windows. There are 32- and 64-bit versions available.

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It's nice to share. When you were a kid, mom told you to share your toys. Helped things run more smoothly in the sandbox. As an adult, sharing is still a pretty good idea. Letting your lunch companion nibble on a couple of your fries is a good thing. So how far do you want the sharing thing to go? If you share your french fries, you have pretty good control over what happens to them once they leave your plate. Share your vacation photos on the Web and you don't have that type of control.

PhotoWham is a tool that lets you watermark your pictures. It's nothing fancy: just the ability to label those photos, drawings, or what-have-you so that folks know whence they came. Just enter your text—including a copyright symbol if you want, and press the magic button. You can do individual images, drag-and-drop a handful at a time, or browse to a directory and grab 'em all. In addition to branding those photos, you can do some image resizing and even rename files or move them into a new folder.

Available for free for home use, you should be able to use PhotoWham with Windows XP and later.

Download PhotoWham

The name pretty much says it all. If you've got a photo and need to resize it, High Quality Photo Resizer may be your ticket home. This tool is specifically designed for batch processing of image files, so if you download the latest photos from your digital camera, it should be a snap to resize them for use on the Web or as attachments to email.

It's easy to resize images, either as a percentage or their original size, or to specific dimensions. In addition, there are a bunch of effects you can add to your pictures, adding visual interest and cleaning things up. In addition to your camera's JPGs, this app can deal with a boatload of other image formats, making it a pretty handy all-around image processing tool.

High Quality Photo Resizer is a free Windows application. It should run on anything from Win2k up through Windows 7.

Download High Quality Photo Resizer