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4

How to do beautiful print screens, with shadows on the border, like this image:this image? Is the shadows automatic? A Mac tool? or do I need to manipulate the image in other programs like Adobe Photoshop?

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+1 surprisingly i found out that not many people knew about this nifty feature in Mac OS X – user6124 May 25 '11 at 14:46

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up vote 31 down vote accepted

No, you do not need to. This feature is built into Mac OS X.

To do this, press ⌘+Shift+4 then press Space. The selector will then change into a camera icon, and you can take a screenshot of the selected window with a shadow.

screenshot of screenshotting

(I couldn't capture the camera icon)

End result: end product

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+1 - I didn't know about the space option. Man, that's an ugly camera icon. – michaelmichael May 25 '11 at 14:41
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To make it easier, the spacebar doesn't have to be pressed right in the sequence like that: Cmd-Shift-4 [release] gives you the crosshairs, after which you can press and release the spacebar. – Matthew Frederick May 25 '11 at 14:48
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That's a lot of junk you have on your Desktop. – Jason Salaz♦ May 26 '11 at 16:31
up vote 2 down vote

Actually I prefer NOT to capture with the shadow at all. There is a command line procedure for suppressing the shadows, but you can accomplish the same thing through the GUI of TinkerTool.

enter image description here

Install TinkerTool and then under its "General" tab, un-check the box next to "Include shadow when capturing window".

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TinkerTool basically does just defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true. You can disable shadows for single screenshots with screencapture -i -W -o. (-i = interactive, -W = window selection mode.) – Lauri Ranta Aug 10 '11 at 13:30
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Thanks for the explanation. While I can certainly perform command-line operations, I highly value tools like TinkerTool, MacPilot, Cocktail and DeepVacuum, which can do all sorts of command-line functions for me in a nice, simple GUI that organizes many parameters of many applications together in one place. – Wheat Williams Aug 10 '11 at 20:02
up vote -2 down vote

The shadows aren't automatic. There is a free tool called ImageShadowAdder that can do these for you.

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The shadows are automatic if you press space and capture just a window. – Ian C.♦ May 25 '11 at 14:48
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Hmm. New one for me. Thanks! – RobZolkos May 25 '11 at 23:03

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