If you are putting together a presentation or help documentation, it is very beneficial to be able to take screenshots of the application and mark them up to bring attention to certain areas. While there are a lot of commercial applications which will do this, if your needs are basic this tip might be of some use.

When I need to mark up screenshots, I use a combination of ScreenHunter, ZoomIt, and Paint.Net. Typically, my needs are extremely basic, so I will pull up the screen I need, press Ctrl+2 to invoke the ZoomIt draw function, “write” on the screen and then screenshot the result with ScreenHunter. This usually fits the bill perfectly.

However, if I need something a bit more polished looking, I will take the screenshot, open Paint.Net, create a new document (which defaults to the size of the screenshot automatically), paste in the screenshot and then use the Paint.Net tools to mark it up.

Again, there are several ways to prepare your screenshots, but this quick and dirty way works very well for me.