Screen Capture (Print Screen) in Mac Computer – Mac OS and Windows OS

For those who have switched from PC to Mac, one of the most obvious difference is the keyboard and its keys. There are some extra ones and some important ones missing.

I was used to taking screenshots by ‘Print Screen’ key in PC but the key is missing in the Macbook I recently acquired. It can take screenshot for sure but in Mac OS the keys are: ⌘-Shift-2

Apart from taking the screenshot the command saves the image in the desktop too. If you don’t want to save it automatically you need to press one more key. The command ⌘-Shift-Control-2 copies the screen to clipboard.

The key 3 in place of 2 gives more flexibility in selecting what you want to include in the image.

In summary, for Mac OS:

⌘-Shift-2 – Captures screen and saves in a PNG file
⌘-Shift-Control-2 – Captures screen to clipboard
⌘-Shift-3 - Captures the selected screen area to a PNG file
⌘-Shift-Control-3 – Captures the selected screen area to clipboard

That was for Mac OS. But if you have installed Windows OS using Bootlogger then you would need different keys to do screen capturing. Screen capture keys are fn + F11 for built-in keyboards. For external keyboards, F14 does the job.

Summary for Windows OS:

F14 – Capture screen (External Mac Keyboard)
F14 + Option - Capture the selected area of screen (External Mac Keyboard)

fn + F11 – Capture screen (Built-in Keyboard)
fn + Option + F11 – Capture the selected area of screen (Built-in Keyboard)

In the Mac OS there is ‘Grab’ application, found in the Applications folder to take trimmed screenshot. Grab allows you to take a timed screenshot by selecting “Timed Screen” from the Capture menu. Snow Leopard takes this concept a bit further by allowing you to record video of your actions on screen in QuickTime Player.

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