How to Capture Screenshots in Mac OS X

Screenshots are the proof of something that you are seeing on your computer’s or laptop’s screen. You can show that screenshots to others by saving them to the hard drive of your computer. In my previous post, i talked about taking screenshots in windows. In this post, i am gonna tell you how to capture screenshots in Mac OS X.

Taking screenshots in the Mac is also very easy, as there are number of ways to alter or modify how screenshots are taken. There are 2 main ways to screenshot on OS X that you need to know – Command + Shift + 3 takes the screenshot of entire screen and save that to the desktop as an image file. Command + Shift + 4 opens the selection area (cross-hairs) allowing you to select the area which is then saved as an .jpg or png image file to desktop.

If you only want to take the basic Mac screenshots, then that is all that you need to know, but if you really wants to expand the screenshot repertoire, then there are the few modifiers that you can apply to above methods.

If you just only want to copy screenshot to the clipboard instead of saving it, you just need to hold down the Control key (Command + Control + Shift + 3 or Command + Control + Shift + 4).

Use Command + Shift + 4 to make a selection cross-hairs appear then press the Space and camera icon that appears. You can move mouse-pointer about the screen to select the screen elements (selected items will get blue). Then selected windows screenshot will get save to your computer desktop.

It may be tricky to get the perfect selection of screenshot but you can constrain it by holding the Shift key. For ex, if you select an area horizontally (left to right), then Shift key will lock vertical selection (up to down) & vice-versa.

If you have the perfect sized selection and it is not positioned correctly, then you can press & hold Space key. This will help to lock the selected area and allows you to move it freely on the screen. Remember to keep holding mouse button.

If you wants to constrain your selection from center-out (as opposed to draw the selection from corner to corner) press the Option key once the cross-hairs appear.

In the last, if you want to bail on the screenshot selection, you can press Esc key to exit the process.