Solicited Review: TechSmith SnagIt 2021

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In today’s episode, we look at the new features of TechSmith’s SnagIt 2021 including templates, auto-simplify improvements, and pop-out magnification.

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FTC disclosure: this review was solicited by TechSmith and they provided a review copy for evaluation.

Solicited Review: TechSmith SnagIt 2021

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In today’s episode, we’re doing a review of the Techsmith Snagit 2021.

Product full disclosure, this is a solicited review, they were kind enough to send me along a review copy to, to take a look at and see how it works.

So what’s new in 2021? Well, there’s a bunch of minor tweaks and things that improve on the application number one, thankfully, finally, we have dark mode, which to me is a big deal because pretty much everything I do is in dark mode.

on my machine, it’s nice to have it supported.

If you’re unfamiliar with snag it, snag it is originally screen capture software, but now has evolved to be more of an instructional piece of software.

And that’s where I think it’s most helpful is when you’re creating stuff for people to be able to follow along.

And it’s got all the typical features you’d expect of a tool that’s for creating instructional graphics.

So for example, let’s go ahead and take a screen grab here of my our environment.

And in the basics of the tool here, you have things like being able to highlight steps.

So when you’re trying to teach somebody how to do something, let’s change this color to something a little more obnoxious.

There we go.

So you can say like, this is the step one, this is step two, the step three, and so on and so forth.

snag its primary use my primary use for his for creating instructional graphics, as well as creating a template, a graphics, template, Id graphics, a lot of people use services, for example, things like Canva.

and such.

I’m not a huge fan of web based services, because they don’t work everywhere, particularly on planes, not that anybody should be traveling.

Right now, it’s the middle of a pandemic, but it requires internet access, and having an application locally on your machine, where you can store your templates and stuff is to me is more reliable, being able to jump in, do the the headers for each show, etc.

And, and get them out the door quickly.

New in 2021, for Snagit, we have the ability to create and edit themes.

So setting your themes, colors, your fonts, things like that, which is always helpful.

It seems like a silly thing to have as a major new feature.

But it’s a nice thing to have.

Because if you’re creating stuff that is going to be for work, and you have an official style guide, this is a better way of managing than having to reset those defaults every single time, or what I was doing, which was a whole series of saved projects that I would just pop over now just do that.

You can also create content from templates, which is actually pretty cool.

So for example, if I wanted to do a certain type of template, like a timeline, I can just fire up a template.

Here.

I start dropping in images and make a single consolidated graphic out of this.

Could you do this in other software like PowerPoint, sure.

But if you’re already doing the screen grabs in a piece of software like this, it’s nice to have it handy.

These templates again, timesavers.

What’s nice is you can also make your own.

So if I wanted to take my daily screengrab thing here and turn it into an actual template, I could do that.

And then again, instead of having to open up the previous day safe project, I could just go in, configure this for how I want it to look, one of the really nice things about this environment is it.

It’s very, very flexible.

So if you wanted to make things like YouTube graphics, social media, graphics, things, anything that you would use a piece of software, like, you know, like Canva for, you can have all that built right in and get to work and crank stuff out quickly.

Also, really nice.

You have all the typical defaults for exporting in specific formats.

The last new feature that I think is kind of fun, is offset magnify.

Offset magnify is useful for when you want to be able to highlight a particular part of the image.

So let’s go back to my environment here.

Let’s use simplify to clean up some of this clutter.

The simplify tool has gotten a bit of a revamp, and now has auto simplify.

That really does a nice job of just cleaning up your image.

And so here it’s it’s already knocked out a lot of stuff.

This, by the way, is really good if you’re sharing instructional stuff and you want people not to be distracted by the interface.

Like I do this with Google Analytics, screenshots all the time, knock out everything on this image except the things I want people to pay attention to.

It’s also really good and super important if you are sharing information of some kind that is, is partially or entirely confidential.

So in the past, I’ve done screen grabs have things like slack? Well, you know, not everybody who’s in a slack instance, wants their words to be made public.

That’s why they’re in a private social media instance.

And so having the ability to do a rapid simplify like this does knock out a lot of stuff.

And then you can go in and say, What are the things I don’t want to simplify, I can take it, delete the things around them.

And then you can, you can have just the things that are relevant, and drag them there just knock out some of these additional things here.

So let’s take a look at this magnify feature.

Because I think again, this is kind of fun.

If I wanted to specifically highlight, let’s do a rounded rectangle here.

There is my magnification, let’s take it up to 300%.

All right.

And then I can pull the magnification away.

That’s it, I have.

It’s called offset minus five, it’s kind of like picture and picture almost, which is fun.

For being able to highlight it, this is the thing to pay attention to.

In this case, I’m highlighting this particular line of code.

Again, when you’re making instructional stuff that you need people to pay attention to a very specific thing to do, you can just kind of if you want to do they’ll draw obnoxious arrows all over your diagram.

But being able to punch it out like this and say like this is the thing to look at, is really kind of nice.

So those are the major things that are new in snagged.

2021 the offset magnify, which I think is is terrific.

The ability to set your own themes, a better auto simplify, and of course, making and using templates to speed up your workload.

The templates in particular, for one person, that nice, right? For a team, they’re kind of essential because you want everybody using the same styles, you want everybody using a common look and feel for your stuff.

So that’s where this is really going to shine is when you have to have consistency across multiple people in your work group.

Again, this is a solicited review, they sent me a copy of it to take a look at I would suggest it you know if you’re interested in it, go over to Trust insights.ai slash Snagit.

Again, Trust insights.ai slash Snagit.

You can get yourself a free, free trial copy to see if it works well for you particularly for a lot of these more advanced instructional use cases.

As always, if you got questions, leave them in the comments box below.

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