If only I had used Window Clippings back in January when I redid the screenshots in the Paint.NET documentation … I would have saved so much time! It has this great ability to capture a window in Windows Vista along with the drop shadow, but without the stuff behind the window. (You know, the blurry stuff.) For example:

The steps to do this before were:

1. Make sure the window is on top of a white background
2. Press Print Screen to capture the whole screen.
3. Paste in to Paint.NET with Ctrl+Alt+V.
4. Crop the image to a large rectangular area that encompasses the window and the drop shadow, but nothing else.
5. Switch to the Magic Wand tool.
6. Make sure the Tolerance is set to 0%.
7. Click on the white area just past the drop shadow.
8. Press Ctrl+I to invert the selection.
9. Press Ctrl+Shift+X to crop the image to the selected area.
10. Create a new layer.
11. Fill the layer with white
12. Move the layer below the “Background” layer
13. Flatten the image
14. Save!

It was a repetetive and error-prone process. But with Window Clippings, this is a much simpler process:

1. Press Ctrl + Print Screen.
2. Double click the window that I care about.
3. Paste it into Paint.NET with Ctrl+Alt+V.
4. Save!

Anyway, Kenny Kerr just announced that the new 2.0 release is available. Looking at the new features, I can immediately see a use for inclusion of the mouse cursor and tooltips in screenshots.