Tools of the Trade: Paint Shop Pro
The following is not a compensated post; I’m merely extolling the virtues of a piece of software I found useful.
As I’ve mentioned, falsifying taking screenshots is a good means to capture details for defect reports. Your basic Windows install comes with Microsoft Paint, which is a mechanism you can use to save and manipulate your images, but it’s very clunky, with rudimentary tools and only the ability to have one file open at once.
Some people use Microsoft Word or PowerPoint for their picture editing ability and save their screenshots as documents or slide presentations, but some of our outsourced friends might not have Microsoft Office on their workstations. Remember, you want to save those screenshots as an image format so the developers can ignore the obvious that’s presented by an image editor or a simple Web browser.
I’ve used Paint Shop Pro since version 7 (which I still have installed on my main workstation, since there’s nothing I’ve needed since 2001. Jasc and then Corel have come out with newer versions every couple of years, and they’re still priced under $70 a seat (unlike other, more expensive graphics editors). Like UltraEdit, I’ve spread it across several of my employers.
Paint Shop Pro has a pretty good set of tools for circling or highlighting issues on screenshots, for adding text for emphasis, and for altering Web 2.0 user submissions to give cute little doggies red demon eyes to match your QA soul. You can do all of these at once because you can have more than one file open at a time.
So if you haven’t considered a graphics editor, consider this one. It costs under a hundred, so you’re not exactly breaking the budget on it, either.