How can I prevent the screen from turning dark gray while using the Snipping Tool on Windows 11?

If your problem is that the screen becomes so dark you can't see it, then you may want to turn up the brightness in your display settings or enable/disable HDR. One setting may work better for some and the other for others. 

If your problem is that the screenshots them selves come out grey sometimes or all washed out other times as it was for me, open up settings in the snipping tool and turn off the feature "HDR screenshot color corrector". This feature trys do dim bright screenshots and brighten dim ones, but it does a bad job of it. 

Imagine being tasked with designing a snipping tool, and you think, "What this needs to do is make the screen go so dark that you can't see what you're snipping". And your superiors at the billion dollar corporation you work for say, "Wow, that's a great idea!" The mind boggles.

I cannot for the life of me understand why Microsoft haven't sorted this issue out, after all it clerly makes their snipping tool as good as useless! 😠

I encountered this problem trying to capture an image from an app on Windows 11 by using WinKey+Shift+S to do the snip. It turned out the app was grabbing the "Shift+S" part of that keystroke to invoke its Search box  just before Snipping tool was activated, which greyed the screen before the snip was taken (in addition to Snipping tool's greying). Who knew an App could grab part of the Winkey+Shift+S keystroke? Anyway, I figured out two ways to get around it. (1) Clicked outside the app, e.g., on the desktop, before doing WinKey+Shift+S for the snip. (2) Invoked the snip by first starting the Snipping Tool (Start+"Snipping Tool") and then using its "+ New" button.  Cheers all. 

The above steps do not work there is no, "Show screen overlay when Snipping Tool is active." in Windows 11 Snipping Tool. As the Snipping Tool is, it is practically useless! 🤬

There is no "Options" option.  There is only a "Settings", and there is no setting regarding screen overlays.  Is this just an intentional MS 'feature' to prevent people from copying on-screen content?

The tool would be excellent if only there really was an option to turn off screen dimming / overlay. Every single screen snip I take now has a dark gray overlay and is generally unusable. We use screen snips / screenshots for customer service, developing training material, diagnosing incidents and software issues, creating presentations, etc. The lack of an option to turn off screen dimming makes snipping tool pretty much unusable in our environment. PLEASE bring back the option to disable this!   - Jon

the option is not there anymore 🥲

Are you referring to the old Windows 10 Snipping Tool? 

My New Windows 11 Snipping Tool (Version 11.2503.29.0) does not have an Options menu or a "Show screen overlay when Snipping Tool is active." box to uncheck.

There is a Setting menu, but no option to keep the lights on...