OSX screenshot – Screen capture on Mac Computers

It is perfectly possible to use the inbuilt tools within OSX Lion to do your Mac screen capture. You can capture a full-screen and you can capture a section of the screen with using a marquee selection otherwise known as a crosshair snapshot. With Mac OSX Lion there are also the capabilities to capture screen recordings that you might perhaps use if you were to do a screencast. You would do this by opening up Quicktime. While it is superb that Apple did put these tools in for all the basic things of this nature that you might like to do with a screen capture or screenshots on Mac, for quite a few users there is going to be the need to use something a little bit more powerful.

Skitch for screenshot in Mac

For me there is only one application that is on my list for applications that will do screen grabs and that is Skitch. The Skitch application, which is now owned by Evernote has been for a long time, one of the applications which just has to be on any machine that I own or set up. I am constantly grabbing sections on screen, perhaps from a website and Skitch is perfect for this job, because of the extra tools you get. Being able to do quick annotations on an image that I have grabbed from my computer screen with Skitch is invaluable. I can draw freehand on top of an image or I can use tools to do straight lines, circles, squares and even arrows using Skitch. I would say that the tool I would use mostly would be the arrow tool closely followed by the text tool. It is really very handy to be able to use the arrow tool and then add text to label the point that I wish to make.

Screen shot in Mac – Different types of OSX screenshot

Pixelmator
I use the keyboard shortcut of Shift Command 5 to use the crosshair snap tool in Skitch. Or if I wished to snap the whole of the screen I would use Shift Command 6. At present those are the only ones that I have set up a keyboard shortcuts for, but I can also in Skitch do a snap from Safari or a snap from a link. Then there is also the frame snapshot or a cam snapshot. The big limitation with Skitch as I see it is that if you want to combine more than one image then you need to use another application. For me that is not a problem as I have Pixelmator version 2 on my computer. Pixelmator is an inexpensive bitmap editing application for the Mac which will do all of the requirements of a normal user (Up to what you might call a Prosumer.). It would be quite unnecessary to pay the exorbitant amount of money required to buy any Adobe products such as PhotoShop. Get that OSX screenshot with Skitch

Screen capture on Mac using the iSight camera

If you do a screenshot from the iSight camera on your Mac you will be disappointed to see that the size that Skitch gives you is only 160 pixels by 120 pixels. The camera is capable of much better in terms of resolution than that. I was so surprised at the size of the snap from the iSight camera that I checked in the preferences for Skitch to see if there was any possibility of getting a larger snap from the camera, but it looks like there isn’t. And then I found that there is a button to the bottom left-hand corner of the Skitch window, when I clicked on that, I was shown the full-size image of the capture. Obviously I was doing something wrong or just didn’t understand exactly how the application worked with the snapshots from the iSight camera.

If you don’t like your OSX screenshot annotations you can rub them out.

There is a way of erasing items that you have put onto your picture. So if you have put an arrow on there or a line and you decide you don’t want it then you can rub it out or just get rid of a part of it. With the text tool you can change the font and the colour of the text and you may also choose whether to have an outline and or a drop shadow. One of the most used tools for me that is included with Skitch is the resize tool. I will use this often to reduce the size of an image that I have captured so that it will fit better onto a web page for me.

Then there is ScreenFlow to capture video from screen

<img style=”display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;” src=”http://mac20q.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Screencasting-Software-ScreenFlow-Overview-Telestream.png” alt=”Screencasting Software ScreenFlow Overview Telestream” title=”Screencasting Software ScreenFlow capture video from screen Telestream” ” border=”0″ width=”549″ height=”319″ />
ScreenFlow is a marvellous application which lets me make screencasts that I can post to YouTube. Not only can you capture video from screen in the Mac OSX, but you can also edit that video with surprising ease. Even though I have Final Cut Pro 10 and enjoy using that application, I do quite often do the editing of a screencast in ScreenFlow. It is very easy indeed to be able to insert transitions, video actions, callouts, add shapes and also add text within this screencasting application. The cost to buy ScreenFlow is $99, but you do get many more features and benefits from using ScreenFlow over using the built-in Mac OS X Lion tools that you would use to capture video from screen. At least if you only want to do simple screen capture on Mac computers, of simple flat non-video images then using Skitch is a no-brainer with it being free.

Learn how to use ScreenFlow from my YouTube screencasts

Go to the YouTube Mac20Q – Wizardgold channel and have a look at the screencasts I have published showing how to use and get the best from ScreenFlow.