One of the great things about OS X is that there are so many hidden features that really step up your productivity. One of these is the ability to take quick screen captures with just a few key strokes. The easiest way is by hitting Command-Shift-4 (and spacebar for full app captures) and the image is “auto-magically” saved to your desktop as a PNG.
Pretty, but annoying
If you’re like us, you tend to take screenshots and then manipulate them afterwards. One thing that OS X does (annoyingly so in our book), is put a semi-transparent shadow around your capture. This could be useful at times as it gives the screen cap a little more “presentation” than usual. However, it can be tedious if you have to remove the drop shadow each time you edit an image.
Removing the shadow via Terminal
As long as you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty under Leopard’s hood, the action of disabling the shadow in Terminal is actually quite easy. Just to cover ourselves though, we must say that tinkering with Terminal can kill your computer if it is done the wrong way. Consider this a warning, it’s not our fault if you try this and you break your computer.
If you’re brave enough to go on, open a new Terminal window and type the following to turn OFF shadows in your screen captures:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true
To see the change, logout, restart or kill the SystemUIServer by typing:
killall SystemUIServer
Next time you grab a screen cap using the Command+Shift+4 method you should see your screen captures without the shadow. Sweet! However, if you want to turn the shadow back ON type the following command in to a Terminal window:
defaults delete com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow
Follow the same steps above to see the changes take effect (logout, restart, or kill the SystemUIServer). Voilà , back to normal.
Hopefully you’ll find this quick tip helpful ad please let us know if there are other tips and shortcuts you’d like us to cover in future posts!
[...] (based on this article) [...]
I’ve given this a try and it did in fact get rid of the shadow. Unfortunately, when capturing a whole window (cmd+shift+4 followed by the space bar) this not only gets rid of the shadow, but you also will lose your transparency behind the rounded corners at the top of the browser window. Easily corrected by using a mask, but if I have to do that, I might as well mask out the drop shadow at the same time instead of using this trick to customize the default functionality.
You can also disable shadow this in the ‘General’ tab on Tinkertool (http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html)
Wait, let me guess, if your post-processing the screen shots, it’s probably because you want to crop them to the interesting parts, right?
In that case, you can just select the part of the screen you’re interested in right after hitting CMD-Shift-4. Screen shots made this way omit the drop shadow.
Thanks for all of the great input guys! Certainly there are a couple ways to grab screenshots, and it really all depends on the desired output.
@Mark Hagers: Another excellent method that we use all the time to “crop” certain parts of sites out. When all you need is a tiny portion of the image, the CMD-Shift-4 method works very well.
[...] Macalicious [...]
[...] Macalicious This article makes good use of alternating colors in its headers. The body text is also very readable and has a legible contrast. [...]
Finally, I’ve found it… I was looking to solve this issue about 4 hours ago, thank you, thank you, thank you. I knew it had something to do with the terminal but I have no knowledge within that aspect of apple macs.
Cheers