Taking Screen Shots on your Mac

Posted : 15 Aug 2002

Most of you likely know how to take screen shots of your desktop, but did you know that :

1) You can take a partial screen shot
2) The size of the image depends on the screen colour depth (256, thousands or millions)
3) You can choose for the screen shot to be directed to the clipboard (instead of to a file)
4) You can take a shot while using the menus pulled down
5 )Finder windows can be taken captured directly without having to crop or select

Any screen shot taken is then saved into the root directory of your hard disk (unless saving to the clipboard) and called picture 1, picture 2, etc. Double clicking on any of these files will show you what you have captured by opening the file in Simpletext.

Make sure that you have positioned the mouse cursor correctly either where you want it or out of the way entirely. This is especially important when taking shots of pull down menus, perhaps showing highlighted menu items.

Note that the taking of a screen shot is accompanied with a sound much like a camera click. This confirms that the screen shot has actually occurred. Saving to the clipboard gives a slightly different noise. On large screens showing millions of colours saving screen shots to your hard disk may take a few seconds. A captured file can be up to 3MB in size. Saving just a part of the window or using less colours will reduce the size of these files. Opening up a screen capture file in an imaging editing program (like Adobe Photoshop) and resaving the file in JPEG format will enable the file size to be reduced even further.

As most of the time you want to paste the shot into another program then saving directly to the clipboard enables you to then paste the image into your desired program immediately without having to open the file in Simpletext or an image editor. Although you may want to resample the file first as a JPEG to reduce the file size, particularly if sending images via email.

See the list below for a list of the possible options.

cmd-shift-3 Screen shot of the full screen
cmd-shift-4 User defined area screen shot (click and drag to select the area)
cmd-shift-capslock-4 (Classic only) User selectable window screen shot
cmd-ctl-shift-3 Screen shot of the full screen to clipboard
cmd-ctl-shift-4 User defined area screen shot to clipboard (click and drag to select the area)
cmd-ctl-shift-capslock-4 (Classic only) User selectable window screen shot to clipboard

Classic only means that this option wont work with OS X.
The caps lock key just has to be activated not actually depressed for the above to work.