There are many methods by which you can do print screen in Mac. But the problem is that people are hardly aware of such tricks or better call shortcuts. But first of all the purpose of using print screen should be clear to all. Many times while doing some work we come across certain situations where we think that keeping a screen shot is worthy. Say if it’s a game or any picture/text or something else which you want to share with others then at time print screen comes as a handy option for taking screen shots.
Mac doesn’t have a dedicated print screen key on its keyboard as found prominently in Windows supporting keyboards. Because of absence of dedicated key for print screen, new users of Mac face problems.
There are basically 3 keys involved in executing this process of print screen. These 3 keys are
Shift key
Control key
Command or Apple Key
Now on the basis of capture region there are 2 methods.
PRINT SCREEN OF ENTIRE DESKTOP
To perform this task you need to press and hold Apple key + Shift + 3. Once you are done release them simultaneously. By doing this you would be able to save the screen shot automatically on your desktop in .png or .pdf format.
If you don’t want to save it automatically and instead of doing that you want to copy the screen shot to clipboard to paste it in some other program then you have to press CTRL along with above mentioned keys. Now the set of keys which you would be using are CTRL + Apple key + Shift key + 3. After doing this you can easily edit and perform any other operation with the image in any program of your choice.
PRINT SCREEN OF AN APPLICATION WINDOW
In earlier step we told you how to take print screen of entire desktop but what if you wish to take screen shot of just an application window. During such need you have press and hold Apple Key + Shift + 4. Once you would release the keys, a cross hiared cursor will be seen. After pressing space bar once, this cross haired cursor will change to a Camera icon. Now click the application window and you will find the screen shot on your desktop.
There is one more method other than these two. The name of process and its working are mentioned below.
USE GRAB UTILITY FOR SCREEN SHOT
Grab utility is a handy options which comes in Mac OS X. You can find this utility in Applications > Utilities Folder. Using Grab utility is pretty easy. You just need to double click on its icon.
Choose the type of image which you want to capture and also select capture type. Then you can start the process of taking screen shot. It supports 4 different modes of screen capture. These are:
- Selection: In this you can select the region you wish to capture with the help of mouse.
- Window: In this you can choose the window for which you want to take screen shot. Just select the window and you are done.
- Screen: In this mode you can capture entire screen.
- Timed Screen: As the name suggests, in this mode you can capture the entire screen but after a specific time interval.
In Jaguar version of Mac, The window mode is not functional . In the selection mode of Grab capture utility, it also displays the size of the image which helps in capturing the exact size. The only glitch with this mode is that you cannot reposition the selected region. You can also include different mouse pointers while taking the screen capture. They can be found in Preferences available under Grab.
So this is how you can do print screen in Mac. Make sure you follow the process carefully. This was all about inbuilt options for print screen in Mac. But there are 3rd party screen capture programs that offer great flexibility and power too. One of such 3rd party program is SnapZ Pro X from Ambrosia software. It can add drop shadows; can change the shape of edges and much more.
So if you want more than what comes in built facility in Mac for print screen then you can also go for 3rd party software.
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