Ashampoo Magical Snap 2 2.30

Ashampoo Magical Snap 2 helps you capture images of your desktop, running windows or sections of your desktop and save them to disk, copy to clipboard or send them to your friends via email. You can choose between manual or automatic selection of the captured desktop area. Options include: Fade effects, show/hide cursor options and zooming. Basic editing: spotlight effects, Draw text, highlight area, cut.

When running, the program can be accessed using the drop-down bar on top of your desktop or clicking the traybar icon. Whenever you take a screen capture, the toolbars will appear on your screen on three sides of your desktop as drop-down bars. The Action bar (located on the top of the screen) allows you to zoom, rotate, apply effects, mirror or flip image. On the left, there is an Image bar which allows you to select the target for the capture: disk, copy to clipboard or send them via email. On the right side of the screen, there's the Mousetools bar containing tools designed for editing the captured content: pencil, highlighter.

Pluses: The "Ctrl+Left click" screenshot option gives you the freedom to minimize or maximize windows before capturing an image of your desktop. Multi-language support.

Drawbacks / flaws: You cannot record screen video. You can only save in BMP, JPG and GIF image file format. You can't discard a capture by hitting 'Esc'.

In conclusion: Ashampoo Magical Snap 2 is not an extremely elaborate screen capturing application, but it does it's job!

version reviewed: 2