Photoshop Ninja
Expert Photoshop tips and tricks for designers and photographers since 2005
OSX Capturing the screen shortcuts
There are lots of times when you need to capture what’s on your screen and get it into Photoshop. OSX provides a few little gems for this exact purpose. This is a great tip for web developers who want to fine tune and check css layouts and refine designs, and a whole host of other tasks that involve image extraction.
Most people know the basic Apple+Shift+3 shortcut that captures your screen to a file on your desktop (format depends on version of OSX – but all can be opened in Photoshop).
A nicer version of this is Apple+Shift+4, which gives you a crosshair cursor that works like the Photoshop marquee selection tool. You simply drag around the section of the screen that you want to capture and let go of the mouse – saving it as a file onto the desktop.
A little known shortcut is holding down Control with each of the shortcuts above – this captures the image to the clipboard rather than saving the file to the desktop. As most of the time you just end up dropping this file onto Photoshop, then chucking it in the Trash this gem saves doing this as you can just create a new document and paste it in.
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Written by Jonny Allbut - freelance graphic designer
Last modified: 7 June, 2006 (20:55) | First published: 7 June, 2006
Filed under Shortcuts - Other 2 Comments »
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Comment by Simon C
June 30, 2006 @ 12:20 pm
I always knew the basic capture screen shortcut, but the shortcut to capture a selection is fantastic – I’m using this all the time, nice work Jonny!
Comment by Jonny
July 8, 2006 @ 2:51 pm
Yes, it’s a real gem! Just saves a crop doesn’t it – anything to save a bit of time!