Capture Screen Shots on Snow Leopard

In Mac OS X, you can use simple keyboard shortcuts to do all sorts of things, including capturing images of what’s on your Mac screen. For example, you can take a screen shot of your entire screen by holding down the
">Command and Shift keys and pressing a 3.

If you hold down the Command and Shift keys and press 4, Mac OS X turns the cursor into crosshairs you can use to select whatever portion of your display you’d like to capture in a screen shot.

If you immediately hit the Spacebar after typing Command-Shift-4, Mac OS X replaces those crosshairs with a little camera. Using the camera, you can take a screen shot of the Dock, the entire menu bar, a single open menu, the desktop, or any open window.

This method will automatically create and save the screen capture on the desktop as a PNG file.

If you do not wish to have a file created on the desktop when capturing a screen, then add Ctrl to the keyboard shortcut (Command-Shift-Ctrl-3 or Command-Shift-Ctrl-4). This will keep the screen capture in the clipboard so you can simply paste it in your favorite application.