Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let me show you how to quickly and easily take screen shots on your
Mac.
So before I show you how to do this I want you to go to the Apple Menu and then go to
System Preferences.
Under there go to Keyboard and then Keyboard Shortcuts.
Then look at the list on your left and click on Screen Shots.
Now this will show you the keyboard shortcuts that I'm going to talk about.
The reason it is important to do this is because that sometimes these can be different.
Somebody could have changed them, you could have changed them and a lot of times when
I tell people how to do this they say it is not working simply because they have changed
the keyboard shortcuts.
So take a look here.
This is also a handy way to remember the shortcuts is to go here.
You can see that Shift/Command/3 and Shift/Command/4 are the primary commands.
Shift/Command/3 will capture a picture of the entire screen.
Shift/Command/4 will save a picture of a selected area.
Now if you add the Control key to this then you actually copy the screen to the clipboard
or copy the selected area to the clipboard.
So it's important to remember the Control key modifier after the Shift and Command.
So I've opened up this little Finder window so that we have something to capture.
I'm going to use the simplest command, Shift/Command/3.
It is going to capture the entire screen and save it to the desktop which is going to be
in a file right below me there.
I'm going to move it over so you can see it.
You can see the file name says Screen Shot and the date and time.
I can double click on it and it should open up in Preview here.
You can see it as a window.
I can shrink it down so you can see it more clearly.
It's actually a png file you can see that.
Which is a good lossless format to be able to save these screen shots.
I can use Preview here to actually export it to something else if I wanted to.
Now let's use the variation that saves it to the clipboard.
So I'm going to add Control to it.
So I'm going to do Control/Command/Shift/3.
I'm going to get that same sound effect of a picture being taken but no file is going
to appear.
Now I can go to an imaged editing program like I'm going to open up Pixelmator here
and I'm going to create a new document and you can see the width and height of the new
document fit what is in the clipboard.
Then if I Command/V to paste in there you can see it will paste in that screen shot.
Now what's really handy about sending a screen shot to the clipboard is that I can go into
Mail here.
Say I am composing a new mail message and I can paste the screen shot into my mail message
there.
So I can tell somebody this is what I am seeing when I use your website or use your software
and give them a message about a problem or maybe show them how to do something.
You can also, of course, paste into other things such as Pages or Microsoft Word.
So it is a really easy way to get something you see on your screen into a document that
you are working on without creating an access file that you need to get rid of later.
Now to use the other option Command/Shift/4 what happens is that I get a little crosshair
cursor here.
I can quickly grab a section, release and you can see I get another screen shot but
this one is only of that area that I had selected.
Likewise I can go to the Clipboard by using Control/Command/Shift/4.
Then grab a section.
So say if I wanted to show somebody what files I had here I can get that section right like
that, switch to Mail where I'm composing an email message and paste that graphic in there.
If you want even more functionality you can run the Grab tool which is in your Application
Utilities Folder.
There you can Capture the selection in the Screen as before.
But you have two different options here.
One is to capture a Window.
So I can select that and hit choose window and then select that window and I get this
entire document's window here without having to exactly select it.
The other is a time screen capture which is useful if you want to capture a menu or things
going on.
You can set it to do a time screen capture.
It will start the timer, you can select different things like in the menu right here and then
you can see actually when the clock finishes here it will capture the screen.
You can see it captured it with that menu dropdown.
But for most needs all you need to do is to learn those keyboard shortcuts and its really
easy to capture a piece of your screen, paste it to an email and send it to somebody.
Hope you found this useful.
This is Gary with
MacMost Now.