How To Capture Your Screen In Mac OS X In Simple Steps

Mac OS X has a very nice way to capture full or partial screen without any software, but many users are unaware of it. Especially people coming from a Windows machine feel there isn’t any snip tool or print screen button. In this article, I’ve explained different ways to capture your screen in Mac OS X.

Mac OS X has always made it easy to capture a screenshot. A screen shot is an image of your computer desktop or an active window.

Many users are unaware of this feature since there is no hot key or app for that and it works via keyboard shortcuts.

So, here’s a summary of all the keyboard shortcuts you can use to capture your screen in Mac OS X easily:

How to Capture Complete Screen in OS X?

This method to capture complete screen in OS X is very much like Print Screen hot key in windows. Take a look at these two simple steps mentioned below:

1. Press Command-Shift-3 to capture the entire screen. The picture will be saved on your desktop in PNG format under the name starting with “Picture” and followed by number 1,2, etc.
2. If you want to capture screen and copy it to your clipboard, press Command-Control-Shift-3. The screenshot will be placed on your clipboard for you to paste into another program.

How to Capture Portion of  Screen in OS X?

This method to capture a portion of screen in OS X is very similar to the Snipping tool in Windows. Take a look:

1. Press Command-Shift-4 to capture a portion of your screen. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, the screenshot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop following the same naming convention as explained on the first tip above.
2. Similar to above, to capture a portion of the screen and copy it to clipboard, press Command-Control-Shift-4.  A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, you can paste the screenshot to another application.

How to Capture Application Windows in OS X?

To capture the application Windows in OS X, follow these simple steps:

1. Press and hold Command-Shift-4 then tap on the Spacebar to capture a specific application window. The cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and the screenshot will be saved as a PNG file on your desktop.
2. Similar to above two methods, press and hold Command-Control-Shift-4 then tap on the Spacebar to capture and copy application windows to your clipboard. The cursor will change to a camera, which you can move around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and you can paste the screen shot into another application.