When I first started using a mac I was aware of all the different ways to screen capture using the built in capabilities of Macs. I thought I would share these with you in case you did not know either. On a PC I would have to install a third party program to do what the Mac does natively.


To capture the entire screen Press the Command-Shift-3 keys. This will place a file on your desktop.


To select an area for capture Press the Command-Shift-4 keys. Select the area you wish to capture. This will place a file on your desktop of the area you selected for capturing.


To capture a specific window press Command-Shift-4, then space, then click on the window you wish to capture. This will place a file on your desktop of the window you wished to capture.


If you do not want to save a file to your desktop but copy it to the clip board, you can do the following.


Entire screen, Command+Control+Shift+3.
Select an area, Command+Control+Shift+4
Window, Command+Control+Shift+4, then space, then click the window.


The file will be in the clipboard and will be available for you to paste in a Pages/Word document or other file.


More advanced screen capturing techniques for Snow Leopard and beyond include being able to lock the size of a selected region and move the selected region around if you need to.


To do this press space bar and you will be able to move the selection area with the mouse. If you need to resize click Shift to resize one edge of the selected region. If you want to resize the selected region based on it’s center, click the option button.


It may take some playing around to get use to. But once you do these are great little tricks for you to take screen captures, selection captures, or window captures how you want to natively as opposed to a third party software like with a PC.