Capturing Screen Images

In many instances, capturing an image of what is happening on your Mac's screen is useful. One example is if you are writing instructions about how to do a particular task. Another is when you want to capture an error message or some other anomaly you want to be able to explain to someone (for example, you might want to capture the image of an error dialog box so that you can e-mail it when you try to get technical support).

With Mac OS X, you have two built-in ways to capture screen images. One is to use keyboard commands. The other is to use the Grab application.

Capturing Screen Images with Keyboard Shortcuts

Mac OS X includes keyboard commands you can use to capture desktop images. After you capture an image, it will be stored on your desktop as a PDF and will be called Picture X, where X is a sequential number. You have the following two options:

  • Shift+graphics/symbol.gif+3 captures the entire desktop.

  • Shift+graphics/symbol.gif+4 changes the pointer to a plus sign. Drag this pointer to select the part of the screen you want to capture. When you release the mouse button, an image of the selected area will be captured.

Capturing Screen Images with Grab

Mac OS X includes the Grab application. As its name implies, using Grab, you can "grab" an image of your Mac's desktop. There are several options you can use to capture a specific image. To capture a desktop image, follow these steps:

  1. Open Grab (Applications/Utilities).

  2. Choose the Capture mode you want for your screenshot using the Capture menu.

    • Selection captures an area of the screen you select.

    • Window captures the active window.

    • Screen captures the entire screen.

    • Timed Screen provides a timer so that you can set up a screen before it is captured (so that you have time to switch to a window and open a menu before the image is captured, for example).

  3. Follow the instructions you see. For example, if you choose Timed Screen, you open the window you want to capture. When you are ready to take the shot, you click Start Timer and get the window as you want it to be captured. After 10 seconds have passed, Capture will capture the image.

    When the capture is complete, you will see a new window containing the image you captured.

  4. To see the size of the image you captured and its color depth, choose Inspector from the Edit menu. The Inspector window appears and you see information about the image.

  5. Save the image. Grab's default file format is TIFF.

The images you capture with Grab are just like images you create in other ways. You can open them in image-editing applications, preview them in Preview, print them, and so on.

TIP

Grab's capturing capabilities are provided to the OS so that other applications can use them. For example, if you are working in a Carbon or Cocoa application, you can easily grab an image of its screen by choosing the Services command from that application's menu. Then, choose Grab and choose the type of grab from the menu. When you release the mouse button, the image you captured will be displayed. How it is displayed depends on the application from which you captured it. For example, if you grab an image while you are using TextEdit, a Rich Text Format (RTF) file will be created. If you grab an image while using Preview, that image will appear in the Pasteboard window.


NOTE

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If you are at all serious about capturing screen images, there is a much better solution than that which Mac OS X provides natively. The best screen capture utility for Mac OS X is Ambrosia Software's Snapz Pro X. This application provides numerous options for your screen captures and it even enables you to capture QuickTime movies of movement on your desktop. Check it out at www.ambrosiasw.com. (All the screen captures in this book were taken with Snapz Pro X.)




Special Edition Using Mac OS X v10. 2
Special Edition Using Mac OS X v10.2
ISBN: 0789729040
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 260
Authors: Brad Miser

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