Exposure Pro is the king of screen capture programs. There simply isn’t anything which competes with it. There are several good screen capture programs on the market (including the excellent ScreenShot, which was reviewed here recently), but none of them comes close to Exposure Pro’s amazing list of features.
As a Mac newsletter editor and software reviewer, I use screen capture programs every day; and I’m a picky user. The point of a screen capture utility is to be able to show how the Mac’s screen looked at a certain point in time. Under normal circumstances, even a poor screen grabber can accomplish this. However, the image often needs to be cleaned up, or a particular part of the image needs to be accentuated or isolated. Or perhaps a label needs to be added. With other screen capture programs, this means dragging out a paint program, pasting the image in, doing the retouching, and copying (or saving) the results. Exposure avoids these extra steps by providing a built-in paint program which includes not only a full range of “normal” painting tools, but also a number of special purpose tools designed to enhance the image in ways not possible with “normal” paint programs.
Exposure Pro is an INIT. To install it, simply place it in your System folder and reboot your Mac. Then, when you have a screen you want to capture, press Command-Shift-3 (or some other user-definable keystroke combination). Exposure Pro freezes the screen at this point, so that the Mac pauses while you do the work. The Exposure Pro panel window appears with all of its tools and menus. You can use the painting tools to alter the image in whatever way you wish. When you have the results you want, a click on the camera icon will save the image you have selected and return the Mac to its previous operating condition. Clicking on the printer will—you guessed it—print the image.
You can specify how the screen image will be saved by pulling down the File menu and choosing the type of file you want: Paint file, PICT file, Scrapbook, Clipboard, etc. If you’re sending the image to a disk file, you can name it and choose its location just like a regular program. If you prefer speed, you can have Exposure Pro give the files generic names, like Screendump1, Screendump2, etc.
You’ll find a standard set of painting tools, including pencil, paintbrush, eraser, rectangles, circles, etc.
Among the many special features offered by Exposure Pro is the ability to stamp cursors anywhere on the image. You can choose from a wide variety of cursors. There’s also a frame tool, which has numerous variations. A special “Bleach” feature converts a color image to black and white.
There’s a unique “Tear-Off” tool that isolates sections of images so that they appear to be part of a larger image. This is great for showing part of a drop-down menu without having to show the whole thing. It can be configured in many different ways, as shown below.
The line tool can produce lines of various widths and with various types of arrows. You can even adjust the size and shape of the arrowheads and create lines that have independent horizontal and vertical widths.
There are several new features in this release. Dither converts grays or colors to 1-bit patterns for black and white printing. Info Stamp adds a text block showing the date, time, and application which was running at the time the screen capture was made. Fix Corners removes the “ears” from the corners of a full screen capture. Isolate Menu erases everything except the menu which is currently dropped down.
In fact, Exposure Pro has so many tools and features that there simply isn’t enough space here to list them all. As they say in those meat sauce commercials, “It’s in there!”
Aren’t there any drawbacks? At $139.95 (retail) it’s quite a bit higher than the competition, (but of course there is no real competition in terms of features). It is a large program—over 300K—so make sure you have the disk space and memory to use it.
The only thing I might wish for is editable, laser-quality text, but I’m sure that would demand completely rewriting the program and would make it even bigger.
I’ve been a happy Exposure/Exposure Pro user for many months. If you regularly need screendumps, why not get the best?
Exposure Pro is published by Preferred Publishers and was programmed by Michael Whittingham, who also programmed ScreenShot, InTouch, and several others.
Exposure Pro
Preferred Publishers
1770 Moriah Woods Blvd.
Memphis, TN 38117
(901) 683-3383
Retail Price: $139.95
(MacConnection price: $69)
Note: In the December, 1990 issue of MacUser, Steven Bobker included Exposure Pro in his article called “Bobker’s Dozen Best”—the cream of the crop of hundreds of products he has reviewed during the past year. Among his comments: “Exposure has more graphic capabilities than some basic graphic programs…a slick performer…no other program can do the job quite as well. It’s a real productivity champ.”
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The article above is reprinted from Mac Monitor, the newsletter of The Savannah Macintosh Users Group. It may be reprinted in a single issue of newsletters published by non-profit user groups. Payment shall consist of a single issue of the newsletter in which the article appears, sent to the following address:
