Category: Screenshot tips

Screenshot shortcuts on Mac

The Mac OS has always made it easy to capture a screen shot. (A screen shot is an image of your computer desktop or an active window.)

This post  provides a summary of all the keyboard shortcuts you can use to capture your screen on Mac. (Check HERE for screenshot shortcuts on Linux.)

  • Entire screen

 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 (e.g., Picture 1, Picture 2, …)

 

Command + Control + Shift + 3

The screen shot will be copied to your clipboard, so you can paste it into another program suchas PowerPoint, Word, GIMP.

 

  • Customized area of screen

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.

 

 Command + CTRL + 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.

 

  • Active 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.

 

Press and hold

Command + CTRL + 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.

 

  • Screenshot with tooltip

 Command + SHIFT + 4

The trick is simple, you have to keep press (⌘+SHIFT) first. Then hover mouse to make tool tip appear and press (4).

         Simple way to do this : a small trick

 1. open you screen , for which you want to take screen shot 
 2. point to tool-tip , it will show that tooltip .
 3  then capture whole screen by Command + Shift + 3 
 4. preview above captured image , and expand to full screen 
 5. now use Command + Shift + 4 to capture tool-tip

 

 

 

  • References and Further reading list

 

 

 

 

 

Screenshot shortcuts on Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat)

This post  provides shortcuts for taking screenshots on Linux (including Ubuntu, CentOS, and RegHat).

The command is the same for Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat. (Check HERE for screenshot shortcuts on Mac.)

  •  Using Gnome Screenshot

    • Press PrtScn to take a fullscreen screenshot to a PNG file (normally the screenshot file is saved in the Pictures folder.)
    • Press Alt+PrtScn to take a screenshot of an active window. This shortcut will create a screenshot of your active window as a PNG file. The file will be saved in your Pictures folder.
    • Press Shift+PrtScn to capture a customized screen area. You’ll be able to click and drag a selection box to determine what is captured in the screenshot. A PNG file with the image you captured will be saved in your Pictures folder.
    • Press Shift+CTRL +PrtScn to copy what you customized area capture  to clipboard.
    • More advanced functions:

The Gnome Screenshot utility allows you to perform some additional screenshot functions, such as adding a delay, and add tooltip.

Open the Screenshot utility. You can find the Screenshot utility in the Accessories folder of your Applications menu.

      • Select your screenshot type. You can choose from any of the options outlined above.

        • (Ubuntu)

        • (RedHat)

      • Add a delay. If your screenshot is time-dependent, you can use the Screenshot utility to add a delay before the screenshot is captured. This will allow you to make sure the right content is on the screen.

        • (Ubuntu)

        • (RedHat)

      • Select your effects. You can choose to include your mouse pointer in the screenshot, as well as whether or not you want to add a border to the screenshot.

(Ubuntu)

(RedHat)

 

 

 

  •  Using GIMP

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed software for manipulating images. We can easily optimize the image, convert their type using GIMP. It provides the power and flexibility to designers to transform images into truly unique creations. GIMP is the cross platforms application and available for Linux, Windows, MAC OS, and FreeBSD etc.

Install GIMP

You can get it for free using your Software Center. Open the Software Center, search for “gimp”, and then install the “GIMP Image Editor”.

For installing GIMP from command line on Ubuntu, check my post HERE.

Click the “File” menu and select “Create” → “Screenshot”.

The screenshot creation tool will open. This tool is very similar to the Gnome Screenshot utility.

 

Select the type of screenshot you want to take.

You can choose to take three different types of screenshots: single window, full-screen, or custom selection. If you choose the single window option, you’ll be able to click the window that you want to take a screenshot of.

(Ubuntu)

(RedHat)

Add a delay.

You can add a delay before the screenshot is taken so that you can arrange everything exactly how you want it. If you have single window or custom screenshots selected, you’ll choose your screenshot target after the delay timer runs out.

Click “Snap” to take the screenshot.

Depending on your settings, the screenshot may be taken immediately. When you’re finished, the screenshot will open in the GIMP editing window.

 

Save the screenshot. If you don’t want to make any edits to the screenshot, you can save it to your hard drive. Click the “File” menu and select “Export”. Give the screenshot a name and choose where you would like to save it. Click the “Export” button once you are satisfied.

 

 

References

4 Ways to Take a Screenshot in Linux (with Pictures) – wikiHow (PDF)

 

 

 

 

 

How to annotate / add markup to a screenshot on a Mac

This post introduces how to annotate/ add markup to a screenshot on Mac.

Adding markup to a screenshot simply means adding things like text, underlines, circles, boxes, and arrows to the screenshot to further highlight or draw attention to certain details within the image. Markup is useful if you want to make quick notes for designers, make corrections to homework, or mark areas of interest within html code to website developers.

These steps show you how to add markup to screenshots without first saving the screenshot and then having to use image editing software:

  1. Hold the CTRL key while holding the command and SHIFT buttons. Press 3 for capturing the full screen, press 4 for a part of the screen, and press 4 followed by the spacebar for a window. This will hold the screenshot in the clipboard.
  2. Open the Preview application on your Mac and then using the following shortcut to view the image from the clipboard in Preview.
command +   N

3. Use the tools within Preview to make changes such as cropping the image, inserting caption text, and adding coloured shapes.

4. To copy the new edited image to clipboard before pasting into your email or document, press command +  A keys to select the full image and then press the command + C keys.

 

Reference:

Screenshot tools for Ubuntu and Windows

This post introduces some handy screenshot tools for Ubuntu and Windows.

For a much more comprehensive screenshot tools comparison, be sure to check out this great post at HERE.

======Ubuntu

One of the powerful screenshot tool, which not only allow you to take screenshot, of any part of screen, but also allows you to edit the captured image, adding text, hiding private content by pixelating, upload an image to a hosting site and much more.

Gimp is a free and open source image editor which can be used for image manipulation, editing, resizing, retouching etc.

When you’ll open the Gimp GUI, go to File -> Create Screenshot and this menu will appear and you can select the option you want, whether to take screenshot of whole or part of screen.

After this, the snap of image created will be available on the GUI for editing, where you can edit the image, apply effects and so on.

(See the references section for more options for Ubuntu.)

======Windows

FastStone Capture works on XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.x and Windows 10.

 

References: