Mac Screenshots
In the little rant I gave on the baked-in Windows screenshot capabilities the other day I mentioned the simplicity of the baked-in Mac screenshot process. Like Windows there are multiple keystrokes to achieve the various types of screenshots.
- Cmd-Shift-3 will capture the entire screen.
- Cmd-Shift-4 then click-n-drag will capture a specific section of the screen.
- Cmd-Shift-4 then mouse-hover then SpaceBar will capture the highlighted window.
With all three of these it saves the screenshot to the desktop. In OS10.4 it saves as a PNG, and I believe in OS10.3 and earlier it saves as a PDF.
I did not know this until I did a little searching, but there is a utility application (in your Applications > Utilities folder) called Grab. This tutorial is a wee bit old, but it does a good job of talking about Grab.
Just like Windows there are other screenshot titles that are fairly popular (Snapz Pro X and Skitch come to mind), but what comes standard with OSX is already beyond what you get with Windows out of the box.
- Published by jason in: Apple Tips 'n Tricks
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One Response to “Mac Screenshots”
#1
¬ Alan
April 12th, 2007 at 5:38 am
If you add Ctrl to the mix on the above key-chords, you’ll get a TIFF formatted clipping on the clipboard, which you can paste into an app like Word or Photoshop. I tried snapping my Dock, but it never turned out except just gray with the black triangles where the icons for the currently running programs were.
There are tools to change the format from PNG, such as shotChoice or you can hack it up yourself from Terminal:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleScreenShotFormat imageFormat
imageFormat can be JPEG, TIFF, PNG, or PICT. I’ve also read that even PSD and GIF are supported, but I haven’t tried it.
A little tool called Paparazzi is unique in that it will “screen-capture” a full web-page, even if the page is taller than the screen. This is similar to printing to PDF in your browser, but it is more like an actual screenshot than a printed web page.
(The links in the preview text above look way wrong compared to what I’ve entered in this textarea box. I hope they post correctly.)
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