How Do You Screen Capture On A Mac

The Macintosh operating system has always made it easy to capture a screen shot. A screen shot is an image of your computer desktop or an active window. Here's a summary of all the keyboard shortcuts you can use to capture your screen in Mac OS X.

When you do that, the Mac's cursor turns into a crosshair and you can drag over the area you want to grab. When you let go of the mouse, or the trackpad, the shot is taken. You can select just one.

  1. If you're away from your Mac but need to grab a screenshot of your home desktop, you can do this by enabling Screen Sharing. Go to System Preferences and click Sharing. Click the Screen Sharing checkbox (if Remote Management is selected you'll need to deselect it for this to work).
  2. How to take a screenshot of a selected portion of your screen (on Mac) Step 1: Open the Capture window. In the menu bar, click the TechSmith Snagit icon to open the Capture window on the screen. If you’re in the Snagit editor, click the Capture button in the toolbar to bring up the Capture window.

A. Entire screen:

  1. To capture the entire screen, press Command-Shift-3. The screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop with the filename starting with “Picture” followed by a number, example Picture 1, Picture 2, and so on.
  2. To copy the entire screen, press Command-Control-Shift-3. The screen shot will be placed on your clipboard for you to paste into another program like PowerPoint, Word, Photoshop, etc.

B. Portion of the screen:

  1. To capture a portion of the screen, press Command-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, the screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop following the same naming convention as explained on the first tip above.
  2. To copy a portion of the screen to the clipboard, press Command-Control-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, you can paste the screen shot to another application.

C. Specific application window:

  1. To capture a specific application window, press and hold Command-Shift-4 then tap on the Spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and the screen shot will be saved as a PNG file on your desktop.
  2. To copy a specific application window, press and hold Command-Control-Shift-4 then tap on the Spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera, which you can move around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and you can paste the screen shot into another application.

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If you can’t explain something clearly, you can crop a screenshot on Mac instead. A picture is more than a thousand word. For instance, you can send your friend or family of how to use a new software, service or something else on your Mac computer. Sometimes you need to draw on the screenshot to strengthen the key point directly.

There is a built-in snip tool on Mac named Grab. You can use Grab to crop a screenshot of custom screen and window. In macOS Mojave, the Grab app is replaced with Screenshot. As for macOS Catalina, Grab is not included. You need to bring it up with Shift, Command and 5 keys. Or you can crop Mac screenshots via keyboard shortcuts.

Whatever, let’s see how to screenshot on Mac in 3 different ways.

Part 1: How to Crop and Edit a Screenshot on Mac

It is helpful if you add draws on a screenshot. Others can understand what you want to express quickly and directly. To full control Mac screenshots, it is recommended to use Vidmore Screen Recorder. You can use Vidmore Screen Recorder free version to take screenshots with real-time drawing effects on Mac. The program is completely free to crop, edit, share and manage screenshots on Mac. Here’re the main features of the Mac screenshot capture software.

  • Crop a screenshot on Mac of the whole screen, a single window or any selected area.
  • Edit a screenshot on Mac with text, arrow, line, blur, callout and other shapes in any size and color.
  • Save a screenshot on Mac as PNG, JPG, JPEG, BMP, GIF or TIFF.
  • Share a screenshot on Mac to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Flickr, etc.
  • 100% free to take screenshots on Mac. No registration or user account required. No watermark.
  • Work with Mac OS X 10.10 or above.

Step 1: Free download, install and launch Vidmore Screen Recorder. Choose Screen Capture in the main interface.

Step 2: You can see the cursor move in the pop up window. If you want to crop a screenshot on Mac of the certain browser, program or entire screen, you can left click the mouse to confirm. Or you can click and drag your mouse to set the certain screenshot capture area.

Step 3: To edit the Mac screenshot, you can choose any drawing tool in the small window. For instance, you can click on the Callout icon to access it. Set the size and color based on your need. Now you can draw on the screenshot image directly.

Step 4: You can erase, undo or redo any change on the Mac screenshot. If you want to copy the Mac screenshot to clipboard, you can click the Copy button directly. It is also supported to pin the screenshot to screen. Or you can click Save to save a screenshot on Mac. In the popping-up Save as window, you can set the destination folder, tags, file name and format. Finally, click Save to export your Mac snapshot.

You may need: How to add watermark to video

Part 2: How to Crop a Screenshot on Mac with Grab

For average Mac users, you can use Grab to screenshot images on Mac. In spite of common Mac screenshots, you can take a time-delayed screenshot on Mac using Grab as well. If you are using macOS Catalina, you need to find it by pressing Command, Shift and 5 key combinations.

Step 1: Open Grab in the Launchpad. Or you can find it in the Applications folder as well.

Step 2: You can see Grab’s menu bar on the Dock.

Step 3: Choose Selection, Window, Screen or Timed Screen to crop an image on Mac with Grab.

Step 4: From the File drop-down list, choose Save to export your Mac screen capture image as JPEG, PNG or TIFF.

Part 3: How to Crop a Screenshot on Mac with Keyboard Commands

If you want to capture any portion of the screen on your Mac computer immediately, you can use the Mac screenshot keyboard commands. The captured screenshot will be saved to desktop automatically. If you want to crop a screenshot to clipboard on Mac, you can press Control with other fixed combinations. After that, you can edit the screenshot thumbnails with other photo editors. (Edit video with video editors)

Crop a screenshot on Mac of full screen:

Step 1: Press Shift, Command and 3.

Step 2: Click the thumbnail to in the corner to edit the screenshot.

Step 3: The Mac screenshot will show on the desktop automatically.

How Do You Screen Capture On A Macbook Pro

Crop a screenshot on Mac of any portion:

Step 1: Press Shift, Command and 4.

Step 2: Drag the crosshair and set the screen capture area.

Step 3: Release the mouse or trackpad to crop a screenshot on Mac.

Parts Of A Macos Screen

Step 4: The screenshot will be saved to Mac desktop.

Crop a screenshot on Mac of a window or menu:

Step 1: Press Shift, Command, 4 and Space bar.

Step 2: Hover your mouse over the window or menu you want to capture.

Step 3: Click to crop a screenshot on macOS Catalina.

Step 4: You can press Option to exclude window shadow from the screenshot image.

Step 5: The Mac screenshot picture will show on the desktop quickly.

Part 4: FAQs of Cropping a Screenshot on Mac

Why Screenshot on Mac not working?

If you crop a screenshot on Apple TV and other related Apple programs, you are not allowed to use the built-in screenshot shortcuts and programs. The Chrome Incognito mode will stop you from cropping screenshots on Mac as well. During this time, you can run Vidmore Screen Recorder to crop a photo on Mac instead.

What to do when Screenshot on Mac not responding?

You can restart Mac or use alternative screen capture software to solve the problem.

Unable to delete screenshots on Mac?

Dragging and dropping to the Trash is the common solution to delete Mac screenshots. If the screenshot image is stuck, you can press Option, Command and Escape to force quit it first.

How Do You Screen Capture On A Mac

How Do You Screen Capture On A Macbook

That’s all to crop a screenshot on Mac of all versions. Can you screenshot on your Mac computer successfully? If you have any question or suggestion about Mac screenshot, you can feel free to contact us.