hi everyone kevin here today i’m excited to show you one of my favorite presentation tools that allows you to annotate and draw on your screen it’ll make it easier for your audience to follow along with your points this works on both windows and mac and you’ll be able to do things that look like this [Music] [Music] this guy right here he’s the ceo of the kevin cookie company why are we giving me a mustache to do this we’re gonna use a freemium tool called epic pen the base functionality is entirely free and they also have a pro version available for 25 dollars which offers a little bit more functionality first off i want to show you how you can get epic pen so let’s go ahead and jump on the pc to get the epic pen app open up your web browser and head to the website epicdashpen.com i’ve also included a link in the description and you can simply click on that to navigate to this home page once you land on epic pen we want to start annotating so the quickest way to do that is to click on this prominent button in the center of the page that says download once we click on download this brings us all the way down the page where we have two different options we could get the basic version of epic pen which is free or we could get the pro version which is 25 so what’s the difference down below there’s a bulleted list that tells you what you get with the free version and what you get with the pro version with the free version you get some pretty rich annotation tools you get a pen an eraser a highlighter you can also take screenshots and you have access to 16 different colors what you don’t get with the free version is you can’t insert lines squares and circles you can’t insert text arrows and you don’t have access to a whiteboard or a blackboard but in general you get quite a bit of value for free for now let’s click on download for the free version and if you see enough value or if this is a tool you like you can always get additional functionality later on down the road once you finish installing the epic pen app go to your start menu and type in epic pen to launch it once you launch epic pen you’ll get an interface that looks like this it’s a pretty simple app but that’s what i like about it it’s very simple and easy to learn how to use there are other screen annotation tools like zoom it which don’t cost anything at all and they have a little bit more functionality compared to the free version of epic pen however the one thing that epic pen has going for it is it’s a very intuitive and unobtrusive user interface with other tools like zoom it you have to remember a variety of shortcut keys to use it epic pen you don’t have to worry about any of that okay enough talk let’s get into how we can actually use epic pen right now by default it’s set to show my cursor and nothing special there that just shows my mouse cursor right under that i have the option to bring up the pen tool and to show how to use this i’m going to make my best attempt at drawing a cookie so i’ll draw a round circle here and then we need to add some chocolate chips this is a pretty impressive looking picture of a cookie when i hover over the pen tool you’ll see the shortcut key combination that you can use to activate the pen tool but once again what i like here is there’s a very nice graphical user interface so if you don’t want to remember shortcut keys you don’t have to to the right of that there’s the highlighter tool and this is very similar to the pen tool but the main difference is there’s a little bit of opacity or transparency associated with the highlighter now let’s say that i just destroyed this beautiful looking picture of a cookie and i really didn’t want to add that highlighter there right beneath that i have access to an eraser tool and i could erase that smudge that i just added to my cookie right underneath that i also have the option to set different pen sizes here if i go and select my pen again i could go with a very large pen stroke or i could go with a very small stroke let’s say that i drew those two lines and i really didn’t want to have them i can also undo that by clicking on undo and i could undo again let’s say for whatever reason i decided i no longer want any of my annotations i can clear the screen by clicking on the trash can and that’ll wipe out all of my annotations alternatively let’s say i just want to hide my annotations for a moment instead of clearing the screen i could go up to the top and click on the ink visible icon not only will this collapse the epic pen app but it also hides all of my inking when i toggle this icon it’ll simply bring back all of my inkings now this is a pretty impressive picture of a cookie and i’d hate to lose it and there’s a take screenshot icon on the interface when i click on that it lowers the color of my screen and i now have a crosshair i could highlight any item on my screen that i want to take a screenshot of and once i release i could save image or i could simply copy it to my clipboard i’ll click on save now previously i identified where i wanted to save my screenshots and i decided to place it right here on the desktop down at the very bottom i can also choose my different annotation colors for instance i’m not just limited to brown i could annotate in blue i could annotate in yellow and magenta and if i click on this box at the very bottom i have access to 16 other colors with the free version and with the paid version i get a few additional colors now so far i’ve simply been annotating on my desktop but you’re not just limited to your desktop the great thing about epic pen is you can annotate on top of everything here for instance i have notepad now open on the right hand side of my screen i’m going to once again open up the annotation tool and let me choose a different color maybe i’ll choose green that’s a nice common color let’s say i were to do a tutorial video on this app right here called notepad there’s so much functionality you can type text into this area and yeah that’s that’s about all you can do with notepad there’s not really that much functionality but here for instance you could see that i could annotate on top of pretty much any application that i could run on my pc now one of the neat things is it’s not just a static image many annotation tools will take a screenshot of your entire desktop and then you could basically use it like a paint program where you annotate on top but here if i load up the cursor tool again i can click on notepad and i can now move this around maybe notepad does more than just entering text and so it wants to disassociate itself from that annotation up there i could pull notepad down now so far we’ve been looking at all of the free functionality is it worth getting the pro version of epic pen well that’s your decision to make but i want to show some of the pro functionality when i go to the very bottom there’s a clipboard icon if we click on this this opens up the menu if we click on settings i can enable the pro tools i want to take a moment to show you what you get with the pro tools if we go back to the pen option there’s now a new option called text and just like the name implies i could click on my screen and instead of writing text with my mouse i could type it out it looks a little cleaner than my mouse movements i also have access to all of these different shapes you could insert lines here i could insert a circle and just like in most apps if i press ctrl that way i could insert a perfect circle instead of just an ellipse here you also get a square or rectangle and then i also have an arrow that i can insert once again i have my eraser i have my different sizes and i have access to a whiteboard i could hit white and that changes my screen to entirely white so it’s a little bit cleaner if i want to have a whiteboarding session if i like dark mode better i could also turn on the blackboard and this will turn on blackboard mode once i’m done i’ll click there and that’ll turn it off now as a little trick if you don’t want to get the pro version well one thing you can do is you can simply use notepad and you can kind of create your own whiteboard or white background this way and you could get creative if you find another app that allows you to insert a black background but all in all you’re still missing a few tools with the free version you can use the epic pen tool together in microsoft teams if you want to annotate things microsoft teams doesn’t have its own inbuilt annotation tools you could also annotate things while using obs here i’m using obs and as i annotate on my screen you see all of those annotations show up in obs next i want to show you how you could annotate on top of live video and we’re going to use the app obs if you’ve never heard of obs before i’ve included a link in the description to a video that’ll give you an introduction obs is an extremely powerful screen recorder and you can also use it to record video to annotate on top of live video open up obs and first we need to add a new scene i’m going to call this scene annotate on video next i’ll click on ok next we need to add some sources first off i want to add my video source because i want to annotate on top of my video i’ll click on the plus icon and next i’ll click on video capture device i’ll leave the default name and now i need to select my camera alright here i am hi everyone it looks like my camera feed is showing up in obs all the default settings look good so i’ll click on ok now i want to be able to annotate right up here on top of my video how do we do that well i need to add an additional source down here once again under sources let’s click on the plus icon but this time let’s click on window capture when i select window capture i’ll leave the default name and click on ok this opens up properties for window capture and i want to click on this drop down that says window and then let’s select epicpen.exe display1 under capture method let’s choose windows graphic capture and then for the window match priority you could just leave that set as is and then click on ok next i’m going to adjust this window so it uses up the full screen now right now it’s just a black window once again right click on the window capture but this time let’s go to filters let’s add a new filter for color key let’s leave the default name and for the color key i want to set this to black basically i want black to be a transparent color when i click on this i’ll go to custom color select color and i’ll choose black as my color key and then click on close so right now i can see myself again and here i have my annotation tool i’m going to move obs to the side so once again i have this canvas over to the left of obs now when i click on the pen tool let me go with maybe let’s say a stark red color that’ll really stand out i can now draw on my screen so here i’m writing draw and what do we want to draw well i don’t know maybe maybe we could draw a cookie again so here i could draw a cookie on my screen and as you see all of this is showing up right up alongside my video you can even have some fun with it and here i’m going to draw a mustache on myself hi so you can now effectively annotate on top of live video and you could stream or you could record and i might as well annotate since i have these tools available but you could stream or you could record this video and then you can use it elsewhere all right well that was a quick look at how you can use the epic pen app if you enjoyed this video and you now have a new tool that you can use to annotate your screen please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see more videos like this in the future hit that subscribe button that way you’ll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out lastly if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future leave a comment down below and i’ll add it to my list of videos to create alright well that’s all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and i hope to see you next time bye you