FastStone is a lightweight, yet amazingly versatile screen capture tool that allows you to capture and annotate just about anything you might need.

The program comes with a host of capture types, for instance: it can grab the full screen, the currently active window, a rectangular region of the screen, freehand or fixed-sized regions, even a scrolling window, perfect for obtaining an image of a lengthy web page.

And if an image isn't enough, then FastStone Capture can also record on-screen activity, complete with sound, and save it as a video or animated GIF.

By default your captures will be sent to the FastStone editor. Here you can crop, rotate or resize an image, sharpen it, tweak brightness or colours, add lines, shapes, highlights, watermarks and more.

But if you don't need any processing then you can tell FastStone Capture to despatch your images directly to files (the program is able to generate file names automatically), the clipboard; your printer, emails, Word or PowerPoint documents, and more.

There are stacks of extras everywhere you look: a colour picker, screen magnifier, screen ruler, multi-monitor support, and more. Yet the program remains amazingly compact, consuming under 500KB when running in the background, and very little more even when it's active.

Please note, while FastStone Capture is a commercial product, what you're buying is a lifetime licence: all future updates are yours for free.