PNeo

HOW TO: Take Screengrabs on a Mac

If you use a Mac, it's easy to take pictures of either the whole screen, or a part of it. You just need to press three keys at the same time.

take a picture of the entire screen

Command-Shift-3 will grab the entire screen. You'll hear a camera-shutter sound effect. When you go to your desktop, you'll find a new picture file (called Picture 1.png -- if you do it a second time, you'll find there's also a Picture 2.png).

select part of the screen

Command-Shift-4 will turn your cursor into a cross-hair. Click and drag to select a region of the screen, then release the mouse button. Again, you'll hear the shutter sound effect. As before, the picture will be saved to your desktop

note

You can press and hold the keys one at a time in the order shown. So - press and hold the "Command" key down, then press and hold the "Shift" key, then press either "3" or "4"

HOW TO: Take Screengrabs of Websites

(This assumes that you're using a Windows PC, although it will work just as well on a Mac. But if you use a Mac, there are other, even easier ways to achieve the same end.)

Sometimes you'll need to take pictures of a website (for a competitive review, for example, or to show a client what a particular execution might look like.)

But the "Print Screen" button on Windows keyboards is really clunky. It copies the whole screen, for one thing, and you have to keep switching to something like PowerPoint to paste the picture somewhere. Then you have to edit it to remove the bits that you don't need to see (like the browser window, or bits of your desktop)

And if you want to grab all the contents of a long web page, you have to scroll down, take another grab, then paste them together somehow. This can take a long time.

What you need is something that will let you just grab what's in your browser window.

There's a very useful free little tool called ScreenGrab! that will let you do this much faster.