Dan’s Tech-n-Stuff Weblog

Sometimes taking of screenshot (a picture of what is on your computer screen right now) comes in handy.

Maybe you need it for work to document a process or application.

Maybe you need it at home to show your friend what something looks like.

There are some great applications to help you do this, but if you have a Mac running Leopard you already have what you need.

To take a shot of your entire screen, press SHIFT + CMD + 3.

To take a shot of a specific area, press SHIFT + CMD + 4 and your cursor will turn into crosshairs. Place the crosshairs in one corner of what you want a screenshot of, click and hold your mouse button, drag your crosshairs to the opposite corner of what you want a shot of and let go.

Done.

Regardless of which way you take a screenshot, it will be saved to your desktop as a PNG image file.

What is the CMD key?

In case you’re new to Mac’s, the CMD (Command) key is the one with the Apple logo on it on either side of your spacebar.

UPDATED: The same key combinations will work in older versions of OS X too (thanks, chiquiwalrus).

Here are a few other things I’ve learned about taking screenshots in OS X without using a third-party utility:

OS 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.4 (Tiger) will save the screenshots as PNG files.
OS 10.3 (Panther) will save the screenshots as PDF files.
OS 10.2 (Jaguar) will save the screenshots as JPG files.

A few other screenshot keyboard combos I picked up from MacRumors are:

CMD + Shift + 4 followed by the space bar will take as screenshot of the active window.

CMD + CTRL + Shift + 3 saves the screenshot to the clipboard.

CMD + CTRL + Shift + 4 lets you select an area of the screen for our screenshot and saves it to the clipboard.

CMD + CTRL + Shift + 4 followed by the space bar takes a screenshot of the active window and saves it to the clipboard.