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Mac Screen Capture Tricks

Capturing screen of Mac is not just limited to keystrokes Command-Shift-3 alone to capture the whole screen. Some may feel unnecessary to know many screen capture tricks. Some feel the urge to explore more of this nifty screen capture features.

As I've experienced, I found out many practical screen capture tricks, such as Screen Capture Part of Screen, Screen Capture the Screen Saver and many others.

If you've followed UsingMac for quite a time, you will find that I've mentioned some of the screen capture tricks in my previous articles. Here, I will add more tricks, along with the old tricks, to provide more complete and useful resource.

Before going further, you can take a look of other resources related to Screen Capture:

  1. Take a Snap of Screen Saver
  2. Screen Capture a Window
  3. Take Screenshot of Entire Webpage

Let's get started!

Snap Whole Screen

As stated above, you can use Command-Shift-3 to take capture the whole screen; If you've your display set to 1280x800 then you will get a snapshot with that dimension.

Normally, the captured screen will be stored to your Desktop. This will eventually clutter up your Desktop, we can either save the captured screen to Clipboard (by adding modifier key Control) or save to customizable place.

Capture Selected Area Only

Capturing the snapshot of selected area is the most useful feature of screen capture. This feature also differs Mac Screen Capture from Windows Print Screen.

Keystrokes Command-Shift-4 is used to change the mouse to crosshair form before screen capture area can be drawn. Flexibility is given to Mac users for drawing the screen capture area where Mac users can use several modifier keys for different functions, as follows:

  1. Spacebar to move selected area
  2. Shift to resize selected area either horizontally/vertically
  3. Control to resize selected area without moving upper-left pin point

Note: Selected screen will be captured upon mouse-up.

Snap Single Window/Object

If you press Spacebar after pressing Command-Shift-4, the initial crosshair pointer will change into camera icon. In this mode, area of the snap will be narrowed down to hovered object, including the shadow.

If you want to remove the shadow, you need to execute this command line using your Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true && killall SystemUIServer

Note: Change -bool true to -bool false to enable the shadow.

Capture Screen Saver

If you've realized, I used snapshots of my screen saver for some previous illustrations. Maybe some tried to snap their Mac screen saver but to no avail as the screen saver will be exited by any keypresses.

Special steps are required to do it:

  1. Open Menubar: Apple → System Preferences
  2. Go to Desktop & Screen Saver
  3. Select your screen saver
  4. Hold down Command-Shift and click on the button Test
  5. Now you're previewing your screen saver, press 3 whenever you want to snap the screen

You can also use sticky keys to do the trick.

Note: Actually it's the same as pressing Command-Shift-3, but the order is reversed to avoid being exited from screen saver mode.

Grab the Screen

Grab, come along with installation package, delivers the same service as your system screen capture with several additional features:

  1. Timed Screen
    Menubar: Capture → Timed Screen (Command-Shift-Z)
    The timer will count up to 10 seconds before the selected area/screen is snapped.
  2. Mouse Pointer
    Menubar: Grab → Preferences… (Command-Comma)
    Only using Grab you can capture your mouse pointer. If you insist on using system screen capture, you need to 'photoshop' the snapshot and put the mouse pointer in.

Grab can be found inside Finder → Applications → Utilities.

Change Screenshot Name, Format and Location

Introducing Deeper and its ability to tweak your system settings, including those of screen capture:

  1. Go to Deeper Homepage, download and install
  2. Launch it and type in your password
  3. Go under General section
  4. Pay attention to the center of the pane, there you can see settings for your screen capture
  5. Really easy to be customized and quite fun!

Deeper Screenshot

Hope you can capture the best moment of your Mac!

Categories: Imaging, Tips and Tricks
Tags: Screenshot, Trick

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27 Comments

jhm 

Why does the  [Appname] -> Services -> Grab menu selection no longer work?  For me, the options (but not the grab selection itself) is greyed out.  Thanks for the expanded system capture hints.

Tice 

There is a little freeware called ScreenShotFormatX that does just this (so you don't have to install anything):
http://blog.tice.de/software.php?page=ScreenShotFormatX%20engl&sprache=englisch

Pat320 

What about 
Command+Ctrl+Shift+3 and
Command+Ctrl+Shift+4 (space) to copy the capture in the clipboard instead of save it to the disk, and later, paste it into any image software.

Pat320 

Ooops, sorry, you did talk about…

JC 

I found a screen capture app that I think works better than Grab:
InstantShot
http://projects.digitalwaters.net/index.php?q=instantshot

I can't figure out how to change Grab's file format from the unnecessary tiff to a more reasonable png.

ppxmen 

The best screen cap for me call Screenshoot plus is just a small wigets and easy to use and is free!!!!!!!    download from Apple down load dashboard Wigets

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a good trick haven't clicked before ,wonderful,

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MTS Converter is an excellent mts conversion software that can convert mts files to other video and audio formats. In addition, The MTS Converter can convert mts, ts, trp hd video files perfectly and quickly.
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drew 

Is there a way to change where the picture gets saved without getting additional software? Anyone have an idea? Someone must have known how to do this because they wrote a program that does it automatically. Thanks :)

Drew

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Honestly, I've always been more of a fan of just putting the monitor to sleep than screen savers. Sure they look pretty awesome, but if you're sitting at your computer, are you really doing so with the screen saver on?Good luck for the dates. It has been some times since we last heard about the next tour. I hope they can run it accordingly now.2lSccPQ2ujY4CzOI

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I'm using MacVide ScreenCap.
Nice program - can record audio and video from screen.
http://www.macvide.com/Macvide_screencap/

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