Most of us know about the simple Apple-Shift-3 keystroke to capture the entirety of your screen to a file on your desktop. I find myself writing documentation to be posted to our internal wiki (hosted by Leopard Server) and also find myself posting images to our blog, and wishing that screenshots were of a higher resolution so small sections can be blown up without blurriness or crazy pixellation. I stumbled on an article over at creativebits.org, which features many other great tips, which details the procedure to change the default format and resolution of screen shots, as well as outlines the other keyboard shortcuts that can be used for screenshots.
Basically, the default resolution of screenshots is 60 dots per inch (DPI), and the default format for screenshots is JPEG.
If you ever need to take a screenshot in OS X, fire up terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
then type Return
and on the next line type:
killall SystemUIServer
Your screenshots will now be saved as Portable Network Graphics (PNG) images. You can also specify Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) or Portable Document Format (PDF), depending on your needs. This part of the weekly hint is for Leopard only.
This part of the tip works in Leopard and Tiger, but I do not have access to a Puma (10.1), Jaguar (10.2), or Panther (10.3) machine to test with. If it works for you, let me know and I’ll pass it on to the readership next week!
The built-in screen capture software in Mac OS X is not limited to saving a single file on your desktop of the entire screen. For example, you can capture just a small portion of the screen by pressing Apple-Shift-4, at which point your mouse pointer will turn into a crosshairs. Drag a rectangle of the screen area you wish to capture, let go of the mouse or trackpad button, and that portion of the screen will be on your desktop. Going a bit further, if you press Apple-Shift-4, move your mouse pointer over a window and press the space bar, the cursor will change from a crosshairs into a camera. Click your mouse, and you’ll have a shot of just that window.
Finally, if you add the Control button into these keyboard shortcuts (on some keyboards it is the ctrl key), Mac OS X will take the screenshot and put it on your clipboard, so you may quickly paste it anywhere in the format you specified in the Terminal.