This weekend I finally sat down and wrote a screenshot effect for KWin. This effect redirects the rendering of any window into an off-screen texture and saves the texture into the home directory. The advantage of this effect is that it is hooked into the normal rendering process and so we can also capture the shadow and the translucency to get beautiful screenshots. If we capture a transparent window it does not show the windows below but only the captured window with the alpha channel turned on correctly. See for example:

Translucent Konsole with Oxygen shadows

Of course the effect is not meant to replace KSnapshot. Instead I prepared a patch which allows KSnapshot to use this effect when the user selected window under mouse cursor. The screenshot shown above was captured with this change to KSnapshot. I hope I will be able to merge this change, soon 🙂

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