MASTER YOUR MAC
Snap Screenshots Like a Pro
Whether you’re creating a tutorial or saving an online receipt, a screengrab can be worth a thousand words. Your Mac has long included versatile tools for this, but recent versions of macOS give them a serious boost. Here are all the ways to take advantage of these features, as well as some great apps that let you do even more.
Desktop Curtain
Cover your (desktop) clutter
Acorn 7
Image editing for humans
ScreenToLayers
Capture your screen in PSD
Screenshot Snapshot: NexSnap
Capture Screen Shot Editor
TextSniper - OCR, Copy & Paste
PDF, Screen & Image to text
ScreenFloat - Screenshot Tools
Power up your Screenshots
SnapMotion Unlimited
Extract images from videos
HazeOver • Distraction Dimmer™
Focus and reduce visual noise
GraphicConverter 12
The pocket knife for pictures
Grab it all
To take a screenshot of your Mac’s entire screen and save it to the desktop, simply press Shift-Command-3. If you have multiple displays, you get an image for each display.
If you’re running a recent version of macOS, a thumbnail of the image appears in the bottom right corner of your screen; click it to preview and edit the image in a Quick Look window. Here you can crop, rotate, annotate with text and arrows, and even add your signature.
When you’ve finished tweaking, click the share button or Done to save. You can also click the trash icon—no more having to find a screenshot on your desktop to delete it.
Be selective
To grab just part of your screen, press Shift-Command-4, then drag the crosshair. Pro tip: Hold down the Space bar to freeze the size of the selection while moving it around, or hold Shift to lock the selection along one axis—vertical or horizontal—while you adjust the other.
Focus on a window or menu
Want to quickly grab an open window or menu? Press Shift-Command-4, then the Space bar. The crosshair will turn into a camera icon that you can use to select the item you want to capture. The window or menu doesn’t even have to be completely visible—macOS ignores everything in front of it!
Pro tip: When capturing a dialog, hold Command while you select the dialog to isolate it from the window behind it.
Target the Touch Bar
Little-known fact: You can take a screenshot of your MacBook’s Touch Bar. Just press Shift-Command-6.
Copy a screenshot on the fly
If you’ll be pasting your screenshot into a document or email, add the Control key to the combinations above (for example, Control-Shift-Command-3, instead of Shift-Command-3). This copies the screenshot to the Clipboard instead of saving it to the desktop.
Movies, timers, and more
Having trouble remembering all those shortcuts? Just remember one: Shift-Command-5. It brings up the macOS screenshot panel, which includes buttons for capturing the entire screen, a window, or a section of the screen.
It also lets you take a screencast video of all or part of your screen, as well as a delayed screenshot—helpful if pressing a keyboard shortcut interrupts the action you’re trying to capture (for example, a pop-up menu that disappears whenever you press a key). You’ll find these features by clicking Options.
The Options menu also lets you change the location for saving screenshots, always save screenshots to the Clipboard, disable the preview/edit thumbnail, and more.
These apps go beyond your Mac’s built-in screenshot features.
Hide that messy desktop
Desktop Curtain saves you the hassle of cleaning up a messy desktop (no judgment!) and hiding applications every time you take a screenshot. Just press a keyboard shortcut to “lower the curtain” over the desktop—or over everything but the frontmost app window—leaving the background clean. The app can even temporarily replace your usual desktop background with an alternate image or color.
Take layered screenshots
The full-featured image editor Acorn has the unique ability to take layered screenshots: It saves windows, dialog boxes, menus, and other items on your screen as separate layers, each of which can be repositioned, reordered, edited, and deleted.
Highlight the important window
HazeOver dims all but the top window to help you focus while working. Use it for a professional look when making screen captures and recordings.
Grab a frame of a video
Want to capture a frame of a video at full resolution? Open any QuickTime-supported video file—or a YouTube URL—inSnapMotion, scrub to the desired frame, and click the Capture button. You can even rotate and flip your video before capturing, or batch-capture a series of frames.
Capture and reference onscreen items
ScreenFloat keeps your latest screenshot floating onscreen, with or without transparency—perfect when you need to reference something in the screenshot while working in another app. You can also edit and annotate screenshots; detect or redact text, barcodes, and faces; and save screenshots to the Shots Browser to archive and organize them.
Resize and convert to other formats
macOS saves screenshots in PNG format at full size, but you may need to use other formats or sizes for your projects. GraphicConverter can resize, compress, and convert screenshots to dozens of formats. And its batch-conversion features let you make the same tweaks to dozens or hundreds of screenshots at once.
Capture just text
TextSniper lets you copy uncopyable text, whether it’s in photos, screenshots, PDFs, videos, online presentations, or apps. Simply press Shift-Command-2, then select the area of the screen with the text you want to copy—the text is added to your Clipboard, ready for pasting.