More about screen capturing in OS X
Thu, 14 September 2006
In January 2006 I wrote an article about some cool things you can do on your Macintosh computer. One of the things I discussed was screen capture in Mac OS-X, and in many comments, both on Digg and my website, I’ve noticed that number of people didn’t quite understand its full potential. Some Windows users’ comments go along the lines of ‘In Windows you just press “Print Screen” on the keyboard, how’s that for a cool feature?’ or even ‘Print screen is all you need for a screen capture in Windows.”
Let’s think about this for a moment. Firstly, the key label ‘Print screen’ itself is wrong. One thing you would expect from it is to, well - print the screen. You press it and the content of the screen gets printed on your printer. But no, all you get is screen content copied into the clipboard. For the new computer users pressing it usually leads to “What the…” situation. At least on Windows, I’m not so sure about Linux.
But we can give it a credit for being there for a couple of decades and most of Windows users know what it’s for. After all, we all know that when we pay cargo, it’ll go by the ship, and when we pay shipment it will go by the car.
So what does the PrintScreen really do in Windows. You press it and it copies your desktop screen into the clipboard. If you hold down the Alt key while pressing PrintScreen, it will copy only active window into the clipboard. And that’s it. If you want to keep that ’screenie’ you need to open another application, paste it there and then save it. What application comes to mind? MS Paint, umhhhhh… Even worse, people often paste it into Word Document, making it 5 MB file that could have gone in 300KB.
If you want to capture only the part of the screen (e.g. orange part below) you need to print… capture the screen with ‘PrintScreen’, then paste it into MS Paint, cut it in pieces there and save as jpeg file. So, without extra work and additional application PrintScreen does exactly nothing.
Now let’s see how we can do this on Mac. You press Cmd-Shift-4 and you get crosshair pointer. To select region just click and drag, then let go. The captured area will be stored as Picture 1.png on your desktop. No need for any editing as you captured exactly what you wanted.
If you need to keep this file, well, there it is, keep it. Just move it to a location of your choice. If you want to use it in another document just drag it into that document, and if you still need to edit it for some reason, just double click on it and it’ll open in Preview, ready to be cut again.
If you don’t need the file, you just want to paste it straight into an email or a document, you can press Ctrl-Cmd-Shift-4 and select capture area in the same way. Then simply paste it into your document. And, unlike Windows’ .bmp file, this one is .png, so no issues with 5MB emails here.
When capturing the whole window, you don’t need to select it in order to capture it. What does that mean?
Let’s say I’m typing this article and need a screen shot of a window that is actually behind the active one and is only partially visible, in this case iCal.
All I need to do is to press Cmd-Shift-4, hit space bar to get camera-poiner, hover over the portion of the iCal window that is still visible and click. The iCal screen shot .png file will be saved on my desktop and nothing will change the focus, I just continue typing. Now imagine usability of this when working with two dozen open windows in PhotoShop.
So what Mac OS X does with screen capturing is far beyond reach of “PrintScreen”. I din’t have a chance to check if Windows Vista addresses this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t.
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Posted in New to Mac, Tips
» Cool things you can do on Mac » Silver Mac said: Thu, 14 September 2006 at 21:51
[...] Read the follow up article More about screen capturing in OS X (14 Sep 2006) [...]
Amit Karmakar said: Fri, 15 September 2006 at 09:23
Oh should you even be compring the two :) … Windoze in every shape form and usabililty speaks of its inferiority. Loud and clear. :) I have been using Snapz for a while but the Cmd-Shift-4 is a killer tip. Thanks for that.
rahrens said: Fri, 15 September 2006 at 21:53
Hey, don’t forget about the app Grab; it’s in the Applications folder, and gives you this same functionality as well. Plus, you can grab parts of the screen and have the option of directly saving the resulting image as a pdf, tiff, etc. as well.
Ravuya said: Sun, 17 September 2006 at 02:25
You can also use TinkerTool to change which image format Command-Shift-4 saves in; it used to save in PDF until I changed it to JPEG.
Tom said: Fri, 17 November 2006 at 07:07
Someone wrote this is the article review -
“- Cmd-Shift-4 and then SPACE to capture window? Do you have to hurl a dead goat over your left shoulder as well? In windows you just press ALT+”Print Screen” to capture the active window…”
No actually, this is very simple. It takes 3 seconds *maximum* for me to get the crosshair pointer up and then to press space to capture a window. And then it simply puts the file on the desktop. Handy. No Pasting into an image editor…
Photoshop takes ages to load, good luck with having to wait for it every time you want to take a screenshot. In fact, I’d say waiting for Photoshop to load will take 30 seconds minimum. Now, compare this amount of time to how long it takes to press 4 keys on a Mac. Yes, you know I am right.
Nishin said: Wed, 6 December 2006 at 11:36
Eerr ANYBODY who ever worked with pictures knows a bmp is far better than png… that’s common sense, get the highest quality possible gives you much more choice and control over want you want to make out of it… if your HD can’t handle a 5mb file… well time to upgrade, this is 2006 ;)
Not mentioning it doesn’t have to be 5mb, just save it in whatever format you want (avoid Paint’s crappy jpg… nobody used to work with pictures ever uses paint anyway).
A computer illiterate friend of mine was looking for a way to grab screen pics on his Mac and not being familiar with Mac myself I found this page on google and I was just wondering.. this is a Mac site right? Dealing with Mac stuff ok? … why do you keep mentioning/comparing with microsoft??
Anyhow, pressing 4 buttons seems too comlicated for my (lazy) friend but at least I learnt something in the process, thanks for the tip.
mike said: Sun, 10 December 2006 at 02:40
great!! i didnt know how to grab screens on mac till i googled it and came across this, thanks!!! Beats the windows printscreen hehe
billyG said: Fri, 15 December 2006 at 02:13
is this function available on my nokia mobile fone?
Chris said: Sat, 17 March 2007 at 01:32
I can certainly respect that this feature is handy on a Mac, and being able to save an arbitrary screen region to png is great!
But are you really taking the position that “Cmd-Shift-4″ is a less obtuse command than the “Print Screen” key followed by Paste? Or am I just reading into this too much?
And while MS Paint isn’t a good image editor, it works fine for cropping and saving (if I intend to mark up a screenshot, Photoshop is probably already open), plus it’s lightweight so it can opened without the wait.
Something about this article, perhaps the paragraphs spent ripping on the “Print Screen” key’s name (it used to actually print long ago; it’s the same reason we use “print” commands in programming to put text on the screen), just comes across reading like, “Oh, it’s so simple! Just hold down the Command Key and Shift, then press the ‘4′ key! OF COURSE that’s the most obvious screen grab combination!”
(As usual, both interfaces have their shortcomings, and in both cases trade-offs were made in the design…)
Ilya Birman said: Fri, 18 May 2007 at 18:02
Complaining about how bad Cmd-Shift-4 is, is dumb since it soooo easy to change in OS X. Just go to System Prefs, Mouse and Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, find screen capturing comands, and assign them to Print Screen and Alt Print Screen.
JonasW said: Fri, 18 May 2007 at 20:24
“Eerr ANYBODY who ever worked with pictures knows a bmp is far better than png… that’s common sense, get the highest quality possible gives you much more choice and control over want you want to make out of it”
I guess you’ve never worked with pictures then?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG
M said: Fri, 25 July 2008 at 00:27
In os9 you use to be able to print the window and it printed EVERYTHING in the entire window not just what showed up on the screen. Taking a screen shot was also available with the cmd-shift-3. I really miss the old print window. With it I could print out a list that may be several pages of the contents of a CD or DVD or just a project I was working on. With the os9 print window one could toggle open the folders and the files within that folder would print also (indented under the folder). You could sort the window first by any of the sorting methods (name, date, size, label) Now THAT was a cool print window.