Images: marking up a screenshot

The tools

An image opens in a tab with its own toolbar: besides rotating, mirroring and zooming, it carries the markup tools — the path from taking a screenshot to pointing at what matters and carrying it off into the documentation. And you do not need a screenshot to start: New → New blank image creates a white .png sheet in the marked folder and opens it with the Pen already in hand — Move, the default when you open an image, would have nothing to drag here.

The starting tool is Move: dragging still moves the image, as it always did. Select picks a part — drag to create it, drag from inside to shift it and use the handles on the corners and edges to resize; Esc deselects and Del erases the contents of the region. In Move mode, Shift+drag also selects. In any tool, the middle mouse button moves the image.

The Eyedropper picks a colour from the image itself: the left button sends it to the border colour, the right button to the fill. It reads from the already marked-up image, so it also repeats the colour of a mark you have just made.

The others draw: Rectangle, Ellipse, Arrow, Line, Highlight (translucent, like a marker pen), Pen (freehand), Brush, Numbered step (which numbers itself — 1, 2, 3...), Text, Blur and Spotlight (darkens everything except the chosen region). While drawing, Shift locks squares/circles and 45° angles.

Colours, thickness and blur

There are two colours, in two buttons: the border one (which is also the stroke and the label colour) and the fill, which may be none. With no fill, the rectangle and the ellipse come out as outlines only, and the numbered step and the text use the border colour as their background, with the label in white or black — whichever contrasts. Choose a fill and it becomes the inside of the shape and the background of the label, while the border becomes the text colour.

The Brush paints with the fill colour, in a dab the size of the stroke width — round or square, by the button next to the width. A single click already leaves the mark. With a white fill it is the eraser: it covers whatever is underneath.

The width applies to the stroke, to the size of the label and to the block size of the blur; it is greyed out in the tools that ignore it. Colour and width are remembered across sessions. Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y undo and redo the markup, and Clear markup wipes it all at once (also undoable).

Blur is for hiding (a token, an e-mail address, a path). While the tab is open the markup is reversible, but on saving or copying the pixels of that region really are destroyed: the file that leaves does not keep the original anywhere.

Cut, paste, rotate and capture

Three operations have similar names and do different things. Cut (Ctrl+X) copies the selection to the clipboard and erases the region, painting it with the fill colour (white when there is none) — and the selection stays put, so Paste right afterwards brings the piece back exactly where it came from, floating: that is how you move a piece of the image. Del is cut without copying. Keep only the selection, in the Image menu, does the opposite: it keeps the region and throws the rest away, changing the size of the image.

The rest of the family: Copy takes the marked-up image or just the selection; Paste brings the image from the clipboard as a floating paste — move and resize it by the same handles and click outside (or press Enter) to keep it, Esc discards it; and Ctrl+A (or Ctrl+T) selects the whole image. There are also Save (writes the markup into the file itself), Save as... and Send to today's note, which writes the PNG into Anexos/ and inserts the ![]() in the note. While there is unsaved markup the tab keeps the asterisk, and closing it asks whether you want to save.

The Image button gathers everything that acts on the whole picture: rotate, mirror, resize by percentage, reduce to 1600 / 1200 / 800 px wide (a screenshot is born far too big for documentation), trim borders of a uniform colour, add a margin, drop shadow and burn the markup into the image — this last one turns the marks into pixels there and then, which is what lets you blur over a mark. Resizing carries the markup and the stroke width along.

To capture the screen without leaving LightNote: Capture screen... in the tray menu (or Ctrl+Alt+P) freezes the desktop, you drag to choose the area (Esc cancels) and the cut-out opens in a new tab, ready to mark up.

Limitations: a mark once drawn cannot be moved or edited — undo it with Ctrl+Z and draw it again; animated GIF and WebP open in the animation view, which has no markup; and an .svg is rasterised on reading, so saving asks for a PNG destination.