Capture rounded corners in Vista/Win7 Aero Glass

[tanis424]

Ok, with the black border option removed I get the following (note the small black dots on the corners). I've played briefly with the transparency options but nothing seems to remove this artifact.

[mouser]

try increasing the 2 numbers a bit (try like 80,20).

but really you can just wait for my next major transparency mechanism.

[tanis424]

but really you can just wait for my next major transparency mechanism.

-mouser (April 27, 2010, 10:30 PM)

Ok, will do. I only posted and experimented because I thought you wanted feedback on the newest beta. Perhaps I misread.

[mouser]

no i did! i just realized that there is a fundamentally less-kludgeish way to do this.

[joby_toss]

Using SC's latest version:

Still no good...

[mouser]

i will have new transparency capture method soon, but why do you say "still no good"? looks pretty good to my eyes.

[f0dder]

i will have new transparency capture method soon, but why do you say "still no good"? looks pretty good to my eyes.

-mouser (April 28, 2010, 11:58 AM)

Transparency does seem to work in his latest shot, but compare the images from his previous post - seems to be a thing wrt. theming now (you're probably capturing non-Aero, or sth)

[joby_toss]

but why do you say "still no good"? looks pretty good to my eyes.

-mouser (April 28, 2010, 11:58 AM)

The rounded corners are still missing...check out my previous screenshot taken with winsnap.

[mouser]

the upper corners are rounded in the new SC one, just not the lower ones.. but that's because of the theme change issue tht f0dder points out.

anyway, the new method should solve it stay tuned.

[mouser]

perfect aero/vista transparency capture coming very soon..

[mouser]

all finished and tested in minicap; just have to built it into SC and upload; expect a new version this weekend.

[joby_toss]

MiniCap will be updated too?
Would be great! 

[mouser]

anyone care to try the latest beta ? 

https://www.donation...nshotCaptorSetup.exe

couple of things to mention:

• SC will actually now recover and preserve the alpha transparency from the window, and leave your file semi-transparent (unless you have SC set to flatten screenshots); this means you can now composite them or show on a non-solid background properly.
• Don't miss the new "Window Capture" options tab which lets you control some advanced features, including whether you want SC to try to strip the semi-transparent border outside the window area.

Example of preserved transparency in a window capture, note the semi-transparent checkering on the titlebar:

[mouser]

a word of warning.. one of the really stupid things i did was make the default hotkey for capturing the active window "Alt+PrtScr"; the problem is that if you let go of the alt key in mid capture, you can trigger the active window to change to display the alt key accelerators and other things.

my advice: go to your hotkey options and swap the hotkeys for active window and complete desktop, so that active window capture is Ctrl+PrtScr.
otherwise just make sure you keep alt key pressed for the duration of the capture (right now i have quite a bit of delay during the aero capture process; i should be able to get that much shorter before final release).

[joby_toss]

Well...what can I say...just take a look:


Thank you! 

[mouser]

it took 2 or 3 solid days of working to get it all working.. half a day to most of it, and then another 2.5 days of trying to get it working as well as i could and tweaking.  i'm sure we will still find some minor issues but i'm glad it's basically working! thanks to everyone for being patient and reminding me this feature was needed.

note to coders 1: one lesson learned is that Win7/Aero glass on vmware operates in non-accelerated non-3dgraphics-card-simulation basic-theme mode, which CANNOT reproduce the semi-transparency (at least my vmware 6 can't, maybe newer ones can), and so is not useful for testing such stuff -- that's why i thought for the longest time that this corner transparency issue was already solved.

note to coders 2: i give credit in the help file but i should say so here as well, that Ian Griffiths's write-up of capturing transparency provided the eureka moment for me on how to get transparency information (and convinced me that trying to find a set of windows api functions to do it was hopeless): http://www.interact-...7/01/30/recoveralpha ; a word of wisdom to those coders trying to use this method -- it won't work perfectly as described on that page, because Aero glass effects don't do a pure linear alpha blending.. unless you can figure out the exact blending algorithm MS used (i couldn't) you are going to have to come up with some heuristics for recovering the underlying transparency and source colors (one thing i did was solve for the white-background pixels instead of the black ones since those seemed less muted).

[mouser]

i'd be interested in hearing if anyone finds the options i added useful, or what Windows Capture settings you prefer.

[joby_toss]

I'm not sure what those options do exactly (I'll play with them), but I like the outcome very much!

As for what Windows Capture settings I prefer, they have to be those settings that allow me to capture exactly what I see (WYSIWYG kinda' setup).

[mouser]

i put some hints on mouseover for some of them.

as a quick guide -- if you set the "auto-remove" from 200 to 0 you'll see the difference.  a value  of 0 will result in capturing a larger area outside of the window that includes the existing Aero shadow effect -- i think this is what winsnap does for example.

if you set it to a high value like 200, SC actually detects the shadow and trims it away. this is useful if you don't want a shadow in your image.

the flatten settings i'm going to add a few more options for, but basically they remove the transparency inside the window that SC by default now preserves.  this could be important for compositing when you dont wan't the background to show through it.  one example you can see is if you keep the transparency, and change the background color to red, you will see through your capture; or if you add a shadow you'll see the semi-transparent regions get darker.  flattening will avoid that.  i'm going to add another option to only flatten within detected borders.

[mouser]

Here's a sample comparison:

First we have an image with full transparency and shadow preserved (auto-remove border setting of 0).  Note that the capture is bigger than the normal window bounds in order to preserve the gradual shadow effect seen in Aero Glass, and note that the actual window pane titlebar area is semi-transparent which makes it take on the background darkness:


Now we have the same window captured with the options to crop/trim the mostly transparent shadow area outside the dominant border, so the image is smaller.  And note also that this image uses a new option to flatten any semi-transparent areas inside the border, which makes this image only have 2 values of transparency -- purely transparent outside the border, and purely opaque inside the border (note that the black corners you see are the pure transparent areas, and so you wouldnt see them if you put this on a white background) :

[cranioscopical]

Nice work!

[Deozaan]

New version does not capture Chrome at all (Active Window Capture). The icon in the tray turns red and stays that way.

EDIT: I'm also getting strange behavior when I capture SC window fullscreen. It captures the title bar properly but then makes half of it disappear due to transparency issues.

(Image is 1280x1024, so beware!)

[mouser]

i can confirm that.. let me try to figure out why chrome fails.

[mouser]

Deo,

try the new version, should capture Chrome now, and not have that problem with maximized windows.
download url is unchanged ( https://www.donation...nshotCaptorSetup.exe ).

remember to try changing the options as i showed above if you want to keep the original shadow effect.

[Deozaan]

Both issues are fixed.