Simple Screen Capturing

There are few ways to do screen capture in Mac OS X. These will save the image to your Desktop as a PNG file. If you want to save them to the Clipboard instead, just add + Control in all 3 options.

Option #1 – Capture the whole screen:

1. Hold down Apple key ⌘ + Shift + 3 and then release all.

Option #2 – Capture just a portion of your screen:

1. Hold down Apple key ⌘ + Shift + 4 then release all.
2. The mouse cursor will change to +, just select the area to capture.

Option #3 – Capture an application window:

1. Hold down Apple key ⌘ + Shift + 4 then release all.
2. The mouse cursor will change to +, press Spacebar
3. You now have a camera, just highlight the desired application window with it and click.

Don’t want OS X to output the image as a PNG? Would you prefer a JPEG, just do the following 2 commads in a terminal:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

killall SystemUIServer

That second command may look brutal, but it is only a restart.

For Windows based PC’s there are 2 ways to take a screen shot:
Press the print screen button (Prt Scr or Prt Scn or something similar)
Paste the image into an image editor (MS Paint works fine)

For added power, you can use the Alt + Print Screen button to capture just the active application window!