How to Take Screenshots on Mac
Taking a screenshot may sound simple enough, but chances are there is an even easier way to take a screenshot of what’s on your screen. I say this as someone who has happily used command + shift + 4 for years, only to amaze me when we started filming this video.
Let’s get down to the basics: to take a screenshot of the entire screen on a Mac, hold down Command, Shift and 3 at the same time. To select a specific area of the screen, hold command + shift + 4 and your cursor will turn into a small drawing tool that you can drag to form a frame around whatever you want to capture.
But you didn’t come here to memorize a bunch of new keyboard shortcuts, so just use the shift + 5 command, which will bring up a menu with all the rest of the screenshot options. In this menu, you can perform all the functions already described, as well as select a screenshot of a specific window, record your screen or decide where the screenshots will be saved. You can even send them directly to the clipboard to paste wherever you go.
Bonus Tips: If you press command + shift + 4 and then press spacebar, you can choose which open window you want to take a snapshot of. Hold down the Option key before taking the screenshot to get rid of the drop shadow. Finally, hold command + control + shift + 4 to send the screenshot directly to the clipboard.
To see all of these methods in action, watch the video above.