Screen grabs are AWESOME because they allow you to take a snapshot of a specified area of your screen. That is how I made the thumbnails for my post about using Wordle with Gatsby. Below are some options for both Mac and Windows users (I have divided them accordingly).

For Mac Users:

To select the whole screen:

You probably already know about this, but mac users can hold COMMAND + SHIFT +3 to take a picture of your whole screen. This picture will be saved to your desktop as a .png file. If you are sending it to someone, you may want to save it as a .jpeg.

To do this on a mac simply

1. double-click the picture on your desktop (that will open it in preview)
2. click file
3. save as
4. then select the file type as a jpeg

If you want to use preview to mark on it and add notations, save that .png file as a pdf and use the tool menu to mark away.

To select a specific area on the screen (like a menu):

Hold down COMMAND + SHIFT + 4 and follow the steps above if you want to change its format or manipulate it.

Here are some more options showcased by lifehacker in a post about screen grabs with leopard:

While you hold down Cmd+Shift+4, you can also hit the:

• Spacebar to drag the selected capture region around the screen.
• Shift key to vertically or horizontally lock the capture region.
• Option key to expand or reduce the size of the region proportionately.

To see the new keys in action, hit up the QuickTime video over at Macworld that demonstrates.

Use new screen region capture options in 10.5 [Macworld via MacUser]

For Windows Users:

There are a number of options for windows users. Since I am a mac guy, I went to LIFEHACKER, which happens to be my homepage, for some ideas. Therefore, I will showcase some of their posts for you to explore.

Take and Edit Screenshots with Flatstone Capture

See the rest of this post here.

Windows Only: Reader-recommended application FastStone Capture is lightweight and feature-rich screen capture tool. In addition to saving its captures in a multitude of formats (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TGA, TIFF and PDF), FastStone Capture can send any screenshot to your image editor of choice, printer, email client, open it in a Word or Powerpoint doc, or upload it to an FTP site. There’s no need to send the capture to an image editor for simple tasks however, since FastStone Capture’s built-in editor can easily handle simple annotations and editing tasks such as cropping, adding text, arrows, highlighting, watermarking or enhancements like drop shadows or frames. FastStone Capture is freeware, Windows only. Sharp eyed readers noticed that the new versions of FastStone Capture are no longer freeware, updated to link accurately to the handily portable freeware version. Thanks guys!

You could also use this Firefox extension discussed by Lifehacker:

Firefox extension ScreenGrab lets you save screenshots of web pages by what is visible in your browser window or, more importantly, by scrolling and stitching together the elusive whole page.

ScreenGrab joins the ranks of great, free screen grabbing tools like Snippy that are really nice to have around in a pinch. Of course, if you’re looking for a more full-featured screen grabbing app, nothing beats good ol’ SnagIt. ScreenGrab works wherever Firefox does, requires Java. — Adam Pash

Click here to download this Firefox ScreenGrab

Using SnagIt to capture a whole page on a website (which is pretty awesome!):

(Taken from this post on Lifehacker)
Not-free SnagIt captures screen shots of scrolling windows from top to bottom.
In Windows, the Alt-PrintScreen key combination copies a screen shot of the visible bit of an open application to your clipboard. But that’s just not enough. SnagIt will grab an image of an entire scrolling document from top to bottom - very useful for web pages that change often or might disappear at any moment. SnagIt can record videos of application usage and save them as AVI files (for you time-strapped and good-hearted computer tutors). It will even copy text to the clipboard when the usual Copy and Paste doesn’t work (like a list of files in Explorer.)

SnagIt’s free to try, and a license costs a steep 40 bucks. Handy for the oft-screen-capturing set. IE integration and Firefox extension available.

SnagIt Screen Capture [TechSmith]

I hope this is helpful. Let me know if you have any questions or have other ideas for screen shots.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under By Ben, Technology, Websites, hacks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.