How-To: Screenshots in OSX
Posted by james in 
Have you ever wanted to take screenshots in OSX and didn’t know how?
Like most things on an Apple computer, everything you need is built into the OS.
The easiest, quickest way is to simply use the keyboard shortcuts.
- Command + Shift + 3: Takes a picture of the whole screen. Saves it to your desktop.
- Command + Shift + 4: Allows you to select a part of the screen. If you press space before selecting an area you can simply click a window to capture that specific window as a whole. Both methods save to your desktop.
If you want to copy the image to the clipboard instead of saving to a file, use the following keyboard shortcuts:
- Command + Control + Shift + 3: Takes a picture of the whole screen and places it in the clipboard.
- Command + Control + Shift + 4: Allows you to select a part of the screen. If you press space before selecting an area you can simply click a window to capture that specific window as a whole. Both of these methods places the image into your clipboard.
If keyboard shortcuts aren’t your thing, you can use the Grab application found in your Applications->Utilities folder.
When you first launch the application, nothing appears to happen. You will find the same options as above (the keyboard shortcut methods) thru the menu. An additional option called Timed Screen is also available. Clicking this option will bring up the following window:
This will allow you to capture things that require time to get ready, for example menus and submenus for demonstration purposes such as this:
If using Grab, remember to save your files after capture. Unlike the keyboard shortcut methods, Grab doesn’t automatically save your captures!
There are also a number of commercial software applications for screen captures and screen casting, but since I don’t use anything other then keyboard shortcuts above I would hate to discuss something I haven’t tried.
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