Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to take a screenshot and annotate it.
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So using tools built into the macOS it is easy to take a screenshot and then
mark it up.The keyboard shortcuts for taking a screenshot can be found in System Preferences
under Keyboard, and then Shortcuts. Click on Screenshot and you'll see all of the options.
Now the main option is the last one here. You can use that to set things up
and then use the other ones to get to a screenshot quicker after that. But I just
prefer to use Shift Command 5 in all situations. So let's have some content here on the screen
and I'm going to take a screenshot. I'm going to use Command Shift 5 to bring up the tools
here at the bottom that will allow me to take a screenshot. Now only the first three items
here are for a screenshot. These two are for recordings. You want to check the Options first.
So under Options you can see where the screenshot is saved to. A good place to save it is to the
Desktop. That was you can easily drag and drop it into the proper folder afterwards
or attach it to an email, include it in a message, or whatever you want to do with it.
Now at the bottom you should check Show Floating Thumbnail. That's going to give us easy access to
the Markup Tools. You can also choose Show Mouse Pointer if you want the pointer to be included.
Remember the Last Selection is useful if you're always capturing a portion of
the screen and will start off with the same selection as last time.
Now you have to choose from these three tools here. You can choose Capture Entire Screen, select
a single window to capture, or a selected portion. Very often people capture a selected portion and
capture too little of the screen. So many times I get screenshots while trying to help people
and they're not showing me enough. I'm missing some context and I have to ask them for a larger
screenshot. So when in doubt just capture the entire screen. But if you know what you're doing
capture the selected portion. I'll select that and you can see here I can adjust the edges and
corners or grab in the middle to select an area I want. So let's say I want to select
this area right here and once I'm ready I can click Capture here or just use Return and it will
capture. Then I get a thumbnail at the bottom. I'm going to click that before it goes away.
It will go away after a few seconds and just Save the screen capture wherever you set it
to save to like the Desktop and you don't get a chance to mark it up, at least not right then.
But if I click on it it goes right into a mode where I've got Markup Tools.
So now I can annotate the screenshot. The tools here at the top are pretty self explanatory. The
first one here allows you to draw. So I'm going to circle something and it will actually give me
two modes. You can see the two modes right here. One is to take literally what I drew. The other
is to use that as an estimation of a shape. If I choose this tool then I'm just drawing
free-hand. This tool allows me to choose a shape. So I could choose a circle here, for instance,
and it puts a circle there. I can then drag it, move it around, resize it very easily. I
could also select a line or an arrow which is very useful. Whenever you select one of these
tools you could go to these settings here to change some things about it. Like, for instance,
the line shape. I can make it thicker. I can change arrows to have the arrow on the other
side or both sides. I can choose here to change the line color which with an arrow that's all
you've got. So I can make it red for instance. But if this was something like a circle or a square
I could change the color of the line there but here is where I would set the fill color.
Now any shape allows you to type in it. So I can double click inside here and type something.
Once I have text I could select it, Command A, and I could change the font size, the color,
and other properties. This is particularly useful if you're using something like this bubble right
here. You can write some text in here and then you can drag this green dot here and have it point to
something. If you want to highlight something you also have two other tools here. One is this one
which will gray out everything except a box there. It's a little tricky to use because if you want
to drag it you actually drag the gray area like that. But you can use this to highlight something
while not completely removing the things outside. You could also choose this tool which is a
magnifier so it gives you a little circle and you can click and drag the blue dot to make the
circle larger and click and drag the green dot to change the magnification. So you can just magnify
it a little bit. If you want you can also just click here to add a text all by itself. Restyle
that. Change it's color. Move it to wherever you want. You can even add a background color to this.
So if the text doesn't standout enough you can make it just a plain color behind it.
If you want you can also crop the screenshot here. Which is even more of a reason to use
the full screen screenshot because you can then crop it after the fact removing a little bit
from it like that. While you're working with any of this you can click and select something
to move it around or change it or just use the delete key to get rid of it. If you want to add
multiple things like multiple arrows here you can always Copy and Paste and get another one
or you can hold the option key down and drag to drag out a duplicate from the original.
If you want to start over again you can click Revert to get rid of everything.
Clicking Done will just put this screenshot with the marking that you've added in the place where
you had it set before, so like to your Desktop or directly to Mail or Messages or something
like that. You can also click the Trashcan here to just delete the screenshot and then you can
start again. Or if you want you can bypass wherever it was supposed to Save and click
here and Share it somewhere else. So you may have originally had it set to go to Desktop but now I
can click here and have it go to an email message or to Notes. So I'll click Done and now you can
see it appears here and it's just a regular image here. If i were to double click it it would open
up in Preview. But you can see I can't change these markings here. They are permanently a part
of this. I would definitely recommend renaming the screenshot to make it something that you can
easily search for later or something that makes sense to whomever it is you're sending it to.
So here are a few more tips. What if you want to take a screenshot that's seems kind of impossible?
Like for instance say I wanted to show this menu here and if I hold the Option key down
you can see how things change. So what if I wanted to Capture that. Well, if I were to
use the Option Key here and do Shift Command 5 I can't initiate the screenshot because the
Option Key is held down. If I release the Option Key you could see I don't now have
the things that appear when I'm holding the Option Key. So what you would do in a situation like that
is you would do Shift Command 5, go to Options and set a Timer. Now I can use Shift Command 5. I can
do Capture and it's going to countdown. So now I can bring up this Menu, hold the Option Key down,
and when the screenshot is taken you could see it looks like I want it to look.
Let me take this screenshot and say I want to go directly to a Mail message.
So I'll Capture and it's going to open up Mail.
Now in this case it didn't give me the chance to annotate it. But I can still annotate it right
here in Mail. If I move my pointer over it you could see I can click here and then click Markup
and then I get the same Markup Tools here. So I can still mark it up before sending it.
Another thing I want to show you is Image Size. So all too often people have set
Small as their image size, which makes sense when sending photos. You want to send a cute
little photo and you don't want to send a huge file. That's fine. But when you set it to Small
it's going to compress this and the person receiving it may not actually be able to make
out what's going on because it's too small. So before sending a screenshot always check image
size here. Make sure it's set large enough, in a lot of cases Actual Size is what you want.
If you set the Options to go to Preview it will take the screenshot and open it up in Preview.
So I capture here and you could see it opens up in Preview. In Preview you've got the same Markup
Tools here. The great thing is that it is now just an untitled document. So instead of ending
up with this weird file name saved to my Desktop I now can mark it up and now when I go to Save
I can choose where I want it to save. I can choose a File name. I could also choose a format here
and change the quality of it. So, for instance, if I want to save a nice compressed
screenshot I can do so here as JPEG and bring the compression down to make a nice small file size.
So if you do this a lot you may want to setup your workflow to always go directly to Preview.
In that way you get to name, place, and
compress your screenshots every time. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.