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How do I make a screen capture?

Including a screen capture in a blog post can be extremely helpful when you are trying to show how something is done. Making a screen capture is fairly simple and usually doesn’t require any extra software; you can do it if you know which keys to use.

What you will need, though, is graphic editing software if you’d like to manipulate the screen capture in any way (e.g., adding arrows or highlighting a specific part of the page). I’ve already posted about various graphic editing software.

You can read about how to do a simple screen capture on a PC at About.com.

To do a screen capture on a Mac, use these keys:

Command+Shift+3 Take a picture of the screen
Command+Shift+4 Take a picture of the selection
Command+Shift+4, then press Control while selecting Take a picture of the screen, place in Clipboard
Command+Shift+4, then Spacebar Take a picture of the selected window

Once you have the screen capture and have saved it to the clipboard, open your graphic editing software and make any necessary changes or additions. Then you can insert the screen into your post as a picture.

3 thoughts on “How do I make a screen capture?”

  1. Julie

    Also, Firefox has an addon that you can either click a button in the top right to “snapshot” visible area, or right click and choose to “snapshot” the entire page.
    🙂

    I adore firefox. After using it, I can’t go back to IE…thats what we have at work, and even though I consider myself pretty “computer-savvy”, it still takes me 5 minutes to acclimate 😛
    (also, firefox has another add-on that lets you highlight any text, and then google it from the highlight into a new tab. LOVES it)

  2. Charles Russell

    And if you install Microsoft OneNote in an XP system, you get the same snipping tool there. Nice for quick captures.

    However, if you are doing a lot of screen captures, and want to easily annotate them (which I usually do), I highly recommend “Snagit”. Very cheap, very reliable, very simple to use. I use it extensively

  3. phyllis

    and i just learned that windows vista has this feature built-in, it’s called the “snipping” tool and it will save your image in almost any format. it’s really cool!

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