The Art Of The Screenshot
I take a lot of screenshots, a freaking lot. Let it be for getting an image for submitting things like widgets to websites, capturing windows for articles, or trying to explain to people new to the Mac world how to do something. And with all this screenshooting I have learned a few things. Don't feel like opening a program to take a screenshot of something? Well there are built in quick commands to do it. Simply hit the appropriate key combination and you'll be given a cursor and visual cue of the particular screen shot you want to perform. Images captured in this fashion will be saved to your desktop labeled Picture 1, Picture 2...etc. in .png format. Want more options? Get SnapNDrag. It's freeware and comes in very handy. With this little program you can easily and quickly do any of the previously mentioned screen shots, as well set a timer to any interval you want. After your picture is taken it is shown on SnapNDrag and you can drag it directly into an e-mail, Photoshop, or any folder you want. SnapNDrag also gives you the additional option of which file format you want the image saved as; TIFF, PNG or JPEG. If you pay for the pro version you'll be given the option to scale down screenshots, turn off the very minimal sponsor message, and get access to all of the quick commands it offers. In reality you'll probably find that the free version is quite enough. There are also two plug-ins available, one allows you to crop images and another gives you the ability to add frames. A note of interest, unlike Grab and the built in quick commands, SnapNDrag has the ability to capture images from DVD Player. This is quite nice if you want to use a scene from a film as your desktop background. Simply pause the film at the exact frame you want, open SnapNDrag and set the timer, then return to the film in fullscreen, and voila. There are of course a number of other programs that will take screenshots, including a couple of widgets, but when it comes to ease of use and functionality I think SnapNDrag is the best. Now you have a number of options for taking a screen shot. But let's say that you want to get a picture of your whole screen, but you don't want all of your desktop icons in the way. Or maybe you want a particular colored background, or the default Mac desktop image (that blue swirly thing) but can't be bothered to change your desktop just to do it. Well, you're in luck. There is a simple little program available for free that will do it. It's calledScreenshot Helper. Essentially it gives you a window that covers your whole screen. You put whatever you want to capture on top of it and there you are. It's fantastically simple and works wonders. One last thing. The most common uses of a screenshot are for posting them on the web, sending them to someone via iChat, and e-mailing them. So you want them small. PNG is a pretty small format to begin with, but you can get it even smaller without Photoshop with a free program called PNG Crusher. Simply drag your .png file into the PNG Crusher icon and it condenses your image. Couldn't be any easier. To give you an idea of how well it works I took a screenshot of my desktop, with all the icons etc, using Grab and it came in at exactly 400 kb, I put it through PNG Crusher and it reduced it to 352 kb without any visible loss of quality. Now that may not seem like a lot, but when it comes to websites and e-mails every little bit helps. K. Panda
