How to Take Photos of a Screen

Desktop operating systems generally always come pre-built with some sort of tools to take screenshots. If you have an OS that doesn’t have an inbuilt tool, you can always find some free tools that do that. As far as screenshot tools are concerned, there’s actually no shortage of them. These tools normally run on your desktop i.e., they require an OS to run. If you need to screenshot a particular screen where the tool is not able to run, The tools that can help you out are not readily available. But if you need to take a screenshot of a screen that a screenshot tool can’t run on, then you might consider taking photos of a screen instead.

Although, you will, of course, need a good phone with a fairly decent camera quality to carry out this task but you cannot make use of the default camera app on your phone which is normally geared towards people and objects, not basically screens. Here’s a simple way you can take photos of a screen.

Requirements

Like we mentioned earlier, you’ll need a good camera I guess you’re probably wondering how good does the camera have to be, well, any flagship phone that is not older than 4-5 years will be just fine. Any other phone, as long as you can use it to take good, close up photos in a low light area will also work fine.

You also need an app to take the photo and here is where the main deal to taking a good photo of your screen lies. We actually recommend you to use Office Lens. It’s a free app that is available for both Android and iOS. The app was developed by Microsoft and is solely meant for scanning documents with your mobile phone. This app has the ability to detect document edges and straighten them out so as to get a good image of a scanned photographed physical paper.

We’re going to take advantage of this feature to take photos of a screen. There are other apps out there that perform the same task as Office Lens and it is entirely up to you to decide on which of the apps to make use off.

Photograph screen

Set up the screen which you want to take a photo of. The screen is definitely going to emit light so it will be a good idea to minimize the light in the room. You want to minimize it so that your monitor’s bezels are extremely dark and the screen edges when the screen is on, it will really stand out.

Open the Office Lens app and point it at your screen. Make sure your camera flash is off. You will see the app detecting the edges of your screen. If it’s detecting the bezels of your monitor, then you need to reduce the light in the room furthermore. Once it detects the edges of the screen correctly, take the photo immediately.

You need to wait a bit for the app to process the image and it will give you a photo of your screen. Also, you will see that the monitor edges won’t be included, and the image is straightened out for you. Simply save the photo to your camera roll.

Its worth it actually, the photo above was taken with an iPhone 6. The only light in the room actually came from a small LED lamp. As you can see, there’s no much difference with the inbuilt screenshot apps that comes with some OS.