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I know that we have just touched the surface of what SnagIt can do but I thought maybe I would jump ahead a bit and write about one of my favorite tools in the SnagIt image editing application, Callouts.

Of course, “Callouts” might be a misleading term because I use the boxes and circles to create all sorts of images.  I hardly ever put any text in them.

Open the SnagIt Image Editor and create a new drawing and then select the Callout button as shown above.  Choose your colors by clicking on the squares shown above.  Don’t worry too much about what colors you choose because you can change the colors once you create the callout.

Choose a category and then pick one of the shapes.  There are squares and clouds and circles and those jagged broken window kind of shapes (if that makes any sense).  I use the simple shapes most of the time as a basis for creating an image. 

What makes the callouts really cool are the shadows and the shading.  They have a three dimensional look.

Here is a simple ball shape.  Hold down the Shift key when you draw it to keep it a perfect circle.  The shadow is configurable by clicking the small button with three dots on it next to the Drop Shadow checkbox. 

Once you draw something play around with color combos.  You might be surprised at what two colors blend well together.

Now there are a lot of ways you could go from here using the other tools in the Image Editor.  I am going to try to create something using more Callouts.

This simple plate is created using three callouts: 

I can also add a little more depth and make this plate a bowl:

This was done by leaving the middle and top circles the same and then making the dark bottom circle a little smaller.  You also could use multiple callouts to create a lot of depth:

That’s rough (but I’m no artist) but it at least gives you an idea of what you can do with the callouts.  Here are some other images that I created only with callouts.  Once you start using the other tools we can get a little more advanced.

Throughout all of the tutorials you have seen me using arrow callouts.  I could also use text box captions:

  This is helpful to point something out, even something obvious.

You could also use the arrows to show specific things on a diagram or drawing:

In the next tutorial I think I will cover opacity, or in other words, making something seem transparent to a greater or lesser degree.

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