Ever wish you could grab an image of what you’re seeing in that beautiful new video game? Well you can—in fact, some tools even let you pause the game and take a screenshot using a free-moving, in-game camera.
The usual shortcuts to take a screenshot of your PC’s desktop often don’t work properly in games.
You may just end up capturing a black screen or a picture of your desktop when you press the Windows+Print Screen button to take a screenshot of a full-screen game, for example, so other methods may be required.Thankfully, Steam has a built-in shortcut for taking a game screenshot, and this feature is built into NVIDIA and AMD’s graphics drivers, too. If you’re playing a newer game on NVIDIA graphics hardware, you can even take advantage of NVIDIA Ansel to pause your gameplay and set up the perfect screenshot of your character. Here’s how to put these different methods to use.
Take a Screenshot Using Steam’s Shortcut
If you’re playing a game on Steam, you can use the screenshot feature built into Steam’s overlay to snap a picture of what’s on your screen. Press the “F12” key on your keyboard to take a screenshot. You’ll hear a shutter sound and a “Screenshot saved” notification will appear at the bottom right corner of your screen.
You can change the F12 key to another shortcut key, if you like. In the Steam interface, click Steam > Settings > In-Game and change the “Screenshot shortcut keys” option.
To view screenshots taken within the game, you can open the Steam overlay by pressing Shift+Tab—or your custom keyboard shortcut, if you’ve changed this in Steam—and click the “View Screenshots” button on the overlay.
After exiting the game, you can also see your screenshots from the game’s page in your Steam library. Scroll down to the bottom of the game’s page and you’ll see a Screenshots section with a “View Screenshot Library” button.
The screenshot library allows you to upload your screenshots to Steam, making them public, friends-only, or private, and optionally share them to Facebook. There’s also a “Show on Disk” button here that will show you the screenshots as image files on your PC, allowing you to do whatever you want with them.
Take Screenshots Using In-Game Shortcuts
Many games, particularly games which aren’t on Steam, have their own built-in screenshot functions and shortcuts. This screenshot key is often just the “Print Screen” key, but it may be a different key in some games. Tap the key in question, and the game will save a screenshot of itself to a location on your disk.
In Blizzard’s Battle.net games, for example, the Print Screen key always saves a screenshot. You can then find your screenshots in a folder on your hard drive (though it’s…
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