Screenshots are photos of your computer screen. You often see them illustrating manuals or articles on the Internet, but they are incredibly easy to create yourself.
You may not have much use for screenshots until you start a big project, for example, producing a glossy magazine. Then you will quickly discover how useful they are. First, ask the printshop technician to make a screenshot of the PDF settings they need for the files that you prepare for them. Use the screenshot as a memo to adjust the settings on your computer. Then, a designer with whom you may be developing the look of the magazine may ask you to send the CMYK reading for brand colors. Instead of copying them out, just make a screenshot of the Colors window with the reading displayed, and send it to the designer. Soon you may find yourself using screenshots all the time.
In this recipe, we will learn how to make screenshots and where else we may find them useful.
The basic keyboard shortcut for screenshots is Command + Shift + 4.
Press the Shift and Command keys together and type 4. The cursor turns into crosshairs, like those in a sniper's telescopic sight. Drag them over the area of the screen that you want captured and let go. There is a camera shutter sound and a graphic file with a .png extension appears on the desktop.
PNG
stands for Portable
Network
Graphics. PNG files are usually small in size, which makes them very quick to upload/download to or from the Internet and to send via e-mail. This makes .png screenshots a very useful feature for displaying or swapping information when working as part of a team.
Screenshots of menus, windows, whole screens, stages in workflow, or of any particular problem can easily be posted on websites or Internet forums to show what you mean, instead of describing it in words.
Additional screenshot shortcuts:
- Command + Shift + 3: Screenshot of the whole computer screen as it is, with everything that is on it at that moment.
- Command + Shift + 4 and hit Space instead of dragging the crosshairs: The crosshairs turn into a little photo camera icon, and the single window—or menu, or icon, or palette—that is behind the camera is highlighted in blue. Click to take a snapshot of just the one item over which the camera cursor is positioned. This way, you don't need to drag the crosshairs to select an area. This additional option is very useful when you want to show multiple complex settings for graphic images or text formatting.
If you like working with clipboard, these two may be for you:
- Command + Control + Shift + 3: Copies a picture of the whole screen to the clipboard.
- Command + Control + Shift + 4: Drag crosshairs to copy selected area to the clipboard.
The copied image can then be pasted into the document you are working on or as a new file in Preview (File | New from Clipboard).
If you change your mind about making the screenshot, or if your crosshairs didn't catch the area you wanted, hit Escape to get out of the screenshot mode.
There is a list of keyboard shortcuts under System Preferences | Keyboard and Mouse | Keyboard Shortcuts. To activate or deactivate shortcuts, tick the respective checkboxes. Another list of shortcuts for iWork is under the Help menu. And, of course, when you click on menus, make a note of any shortcuts available for operations that you use often.
Here are some situations where you may find screenshots useful:
- To show stages of work, step by step
- To show invisible formatting and layout grids
- To capture settings to swap with colleagues or to reply to queries
- To show open menus and formatting palettes, for example, the Inspector or Colors windows
- To upload small graphic files to websites and forums
- To capture scenes in movies (good for storyboards)
- To capture a detail of large pictures, photos, or any graphic image