In Mac OSX there are two built-in ways of taking screenshots, the first being keyboard commands and the second being an application/utility called Grab. Today we will look at the keyboard shortcuts.

If you are venturing to the Mac from the Windows world you probably noticed the lack of the “Print Screen” key on the keyboard. In Windows to take screenshots you would hit the Print Screen key to grab the entire window or Alt+Print Screen to grab just the active window. Mac OSX doesn’t have that feature but has many more built in which offer a wider array of options.

Command+Shift+3 will take a picture of the entire screen and put the output directly onto your desktop. If you hold the Control key down before hitting the 3 the screenshot will be stored to your Clipboard.

Command+Shift+4 will turn your cursor into a crosshairs icon which will allow you to make a selection, whatever is inside the grey box becomes your screenshot (seen in the picture below). If you hold the Control key down while making your selection the file will go onto the Clipboard instead of the desktop.

Command+Shift+4 then Spacebar will turn your cursor into a camera which then allows you to take a screenshot of the current screen and place the results on your desktop. Holding down the Control key while doing this will put the screenshot onto the Clipboard instead of the desktop for use elsewhere.

I use these commands while creating the screenshots for I’m A Mac, I also use Grab for some of the more advanced screenshots and this will be discussed in the next article.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.