How to Screen Capture in OS X and Windows

A lot of people ask me about how to OSX print screen (i.e take a screen grab in OS X) and also how to take a print screen in Windows XP/Vista. I know this has been covered before but I thought I would put up a little post up….

OS X Print Screen

In OSX you press [and hold] the apple command key, hold shift and then press either 3 or 4 (what does the command key look like?… click here). Here are the most commonly used options:

Capture Entire Screen: Command + Shift + 3

Capture Selected Area: Command + Shift + 4;  then click [hold] and drag a box around the area you wish to capture. Once you release the mouse button the image will be captured.

Using the above key combinations will cause OSX to take a screen grab and then store the file to your desktop. The first screen shot will be called Picture 1, and then further screen shots will be named Picture 2, Picture 3 and so on.

Windows Print Screen

Windows print screen copies the captured screen to the clipboard. Once you’ve done this the image can be pasted into a document using your application of choice (e.g Word/Wordpad etc.) by selecting >edit >paste from the toolbar or by pressing ‘Ctrl’ + ‘V’. There are two types of screen capture:

Capture Entire Screen: To take a screen capture of the entire screen in Windows 9x/XP/Vista simply press the ‘PrintScrn’ button. This takes a screen grab and stores it to the clipboard.

Capture Current Window: To take a screenshot of the current window (not the whole screen) in Windows 9X/XP/Vista hold down ‘Alt’ and Press ‘PrintScrn’.