Some notes I took on Mac screen capture:
- To capture the entire desktop, press Command-Shift-3. The screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.
- To copy the entire desktop, press Command-Control-Shift-3. The screen shot will be placed on your clipboard for you to paste into another program.
- To capture a portion of the desktop, press Command-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, the screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop. (The file is saved as PDF in Mac OS 10.3 and earlier.)
- To capture a specific application window, press Command-Shift-4, then press the Spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and the screen shot will be saved as a PNG file on your desktop. (The file is saved as PDF in Mac OS 10.3 and earlier.)
Add Control to the two shortcuts above to place the screen shot on the clipboard instead of saving it to the desktop.
Another method for capturing screen shots in Mac OS X is by using the bundled Apple utility, Grab, located in the Applications > Utilities folder. Grab is useful if you need to include a cursor or a menu in your screen shot, or if you want to save your screen shot to TIFF format. To include a cursor, first go to Grab Preferences and select the cursor icon you wish to have in your screen shot. To capture the screen with Grab, run Grab, then choose of the capture modes from the "Capture" menu: Selection, Window, Screen, Timed Screen.