Taking screen shot in Mac

Mac screen shot

There are many ways in which you can use screen shots, especially if you are a blogger:
- to be included in your recommendation of this or that websites
- as illustration when you want to share a bit about your workflows
- as a quick visual record of things such as your own bog as well as other blogs in your reading list
- for grabbing quick images (of course, if you grab somebody else's image from the net and blog about it, it's only polite to attribute the image)
- and many more. I'm sure you can think of some other things. Including just for fun.
The Apple website does have a very short and sweet instructions for Mac capture screen which you can refer to. So, here I'll just cover other things such as the difference between the different methods, as well a few things to note that I learn from my own experience of using screenshots.


Shift+⌘+3
will give you a shot of everything on your screen at point of capture: your open application, the clock, battery indicator, everything. Check out my sample shot below:

Full screen shot (with excel)

Notice that the shot includes the Dock, my formula tab, my various indicators at right hand side, basically everything.
Suppose you do not want the whole desktop captured? You can either edit the first shot above, OR you can use the 2nd option:
Shift+⌘+4
Will turn your mouse pointer to a crosshair (with nifty numbers that indicate the size of your selected area in pixel) that will allow you to capture a selected area in your screen.
This selection can span different active windows, just as long as they are on your desktop.
You can see the comparison below:

Messy desktop (full screen shot)

Cascading corners using 2nd option

Pretty cool, but maybe sometimes you just want to show the whole of ONE active window, like maybe a browser, opened at a website you'd like to showcase. That's when the 3rd option is useful:
Shift+⌘+4+space
Will capture an active window of your choice.
As mentioned in the Mac tutorial, your mouse pointer would change 'shape-shift' to a small camera. Click the camera at your chosen window and you'll get your shot of just that window.
So, let's just say we start from the same cluttered desktop above:

Messy desktop

And you just want to take a shot of your web browser, basically you press the necessary combination of buttons on your keyboard, and click on the browser, and this is what you'll get:

Browser screen shot 1

Awesome, no?
Now for my own notes:
Additional notes
1. In my computer, all these images would be saved directly to my desktop in .png format. Very easy to find, and taking no time at all.
2. My images range from 50kb for a small selection shot (option 2) to a couple of hundreds kb for full window shot. I think it depends on how complex the picture is.
3. Of all 3 options, I think my favorite is the 3rd option (shift+⌘+4+space). It's slightly more tedious, but the resulting image is the most streamlined and fabulous looking among the rest. I love the slight shadow under the window. You might want to adjust your image posting preferences, however, as the shadow might interfere with your default image framing.
4. Privacy.
I like to have my bookmarks at my fingertips when I am browsing, but really, I don't really need the whole world to know which sites I bookmark. Yes? So before taking any window shot, I might want to first hide my bookmarks by using the browser preferences. Doing this, however, is a pain because I would have to return the settings to normal for my normal browsing activity.
If you look at the picture below, you'll see what I mean:

Browser shot comparison

My Firefox actually have a cool cat skin, which I like very much, but maybe I don't really want to show it to everyone. Now you see the tiny button encircled with the heart? That's your key for a quick, painless shot.
Click on that button, and it will hide/show your private stuff (like address bar, bookmark bar, etc).
This button is actually available in most Mac application, hiding/showing select toolbars. A very handy tool, indeed. For some reasons, it's not available in Safari, though.
That's all for today's tutorial, folks. I hope you find it useful, at least for the Mac users among you. I seriously have no idea about PC screenshots. Sorry!