Screen Capturing Shortcuts (Mac Monday)

Eric — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:41:13 +0000

Ok, I know most of you probably already know how to take a screenshot on your Mac, Cmd+Shift+3 right? The only problem with this is it takes a screenshot of the whole screen and saves it to a file on your desktop.

What if you only wanted to capture a certain window or section of your screen? What if you want the image copied to your clickboard instead of saved on the desktop?

Here are some other screen capturing shortcuts that you probably did not know about.

Screen capturing shortcuts that save the image in a file on your desktop:
Cmd+Shift+3: will capture the entire screen (this one most people already know)
Cmd+Shift+4: You can capture any part of the screen you want by dragging cross hairs
Cmd+Shift+4 then press spacebar: You can capture any window by clicking on it. (see picture below)

Screen capturing shorcuts that copy the image to your clipboard:
Cmd+Control+Shift+3: will capture the entire screen
Cmd+Control+Shift+4: You can capture any part of the screen you want by dragging cross hairs
Cmd+Control+Shift+4 then press spacebar: You can capture any window by clicking on it. (see picture above)

Screen capturing file formats:
You can capture the screen on any version of Mac OS X. The only difference between versions is the format in which the image is saved (if you didn’t copy it to the clipboard).
Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar)- .jpg
Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)- .pdf
Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)- .png

However, you can change the default screen capture file format by typing the following code in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format
killall SystemUIServer

Change image_format to the file format you want the screen capture to be in. Some examples are jpg, tiff, pdf, png, bmp or pict.

Alternative screen capturing software:
If you don’t like using the screen capturing that is built into OS X, there are plenty of good 3rd party programs you can use.

For example, Jing is an excellent screen capturing program for Mac and Windows. With Jing you can even record a video of your screen with audio. One of the best features of Jing is how easy it is to share your screenshot/video.

For more information about Jing, check out this article: How to Make a Great How-To Video.

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Screen Capturing Shortcuts (Mac Monday)

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