We’re talking all about taking screenshots, screengrabs, screen recordings and even Touch Bar screenshots on your Mac laptop and desktop.
Learning how to record your screen or different portions of it might be really useful, especially, if you’re a student and you need to throw a screenshot into a document or a presentation or various kinds of online school work, especially now that a lot of schools are using distance learning due to covid. It’s also pretty useful for creatives who need to take screenshots to throw into a design or a thumbnail and even for screen recording video to add into your YouTube videos but whatever the reason, by the end of this post you should be able to know how to use all of the different methods.
Like all screenshots you take on a Mac, once you capture that image, it will hover on your desktop and wait for you to direct it where to go or wait for you to mark it up. If you don’t touch it, it will automatically save your screenshots to your designated location on your computer. For me, that’s the desktop.
METHOD #1 Screenshot
This first method captures the entire screen. But Keep in mind, this is going to grab the entire screen so whatever is on your screen you may want to make sure is not sensitive information or something you don’t want people to see, for instance your desktop icons or things on your taskbar, so keep that in mind when you use this method. If you capture sensitive info, you can always crop it.
For this method, you’ll press ⌘+SHIFT+3 on your keyboard.
METHOD #2 Selection Screenshot
Method number two is the selection screenshot, where you take a screenshot of just a certain portion of the screen, such as a certain window you may have open, or maybe a small element from a page, or if you want to exclude something like icons on your desktop or maybe some sensitive information.
For this method, you’ll press ⌘+SHIFT+4 on your keyboard.
Once you press the hotkeys, your cursor will turn into a little crosshair. You’ll then want to take your mouse and move it to an outside corner of the subject you wish to capture, then click and hold your mouse and drag it. This will form a dotted line around the portion that will be captured. Once you have your selection the way you want it, release the mouse button and voila, you should see your screenshot floating on the bottom right hand corner of the screen, ready for you to edit it it or drop it in to your application. Just remember, if you wait too long it will save it to the default location.
Btw, if you’ve taken a screenshot and it disappears before you decide what to do with it, you can always bring up the search on your mac and search for “screenshot”, you should be able to find it in the list by filenames, which will include the date and the time in the filename.
METHOD #3 Screen Recording
This next method is one of my favorites because I do a lot of video work where I need to screen record online videos for projects or need to record my screen for demos and tutorials. This function uses Quicktime Player to record your screen, and while you can easily access this feature by opening quicktime player, this hot key can literally save you time searching for the program, opening it and selecting the screen recording feature.
The way you access this awesome feature is ⌘+SHIFT+5.
Now this one’s a little bit more complicated than the others because you have to go in and make adjustments to the settings for audio and what audio input you want to record. Now one thing to mention is that, by default, you may not be able to record the computer’s sounds, only your voice through the computer’s microphone. There are 3rd party workarounds for this. Otherwise, you’ll only have audio from your computer’s microphone. I don’t know if this is some sort of feature that Apple has to keep from having copyright issues or what. I’m not really sure why they do this.
METHOD #4 Touch Bar Screenshot
So with this last method, I’m not quite sure why anyone would need to use this but it is a feature, but it exists, so if for some reason you need to take a screenshot of your Touch Bar then you have that option also. I guess maybe, if you are creating a tutorial for an application or if you’re creating some sort of a user guide for someone and you need to show the information about what features you can access on the Touch Bar, this might be a useful feature for you.
In order to take a screenshot of your Touch Bar you’ll need to press ⌘+SHIFT+6.
And just like all of the other screenshots, you’ll have to quickly decide what to do with before it saves in the default location.
Alright friends, Now you should be able to take every kind of screenshot you could possibly need...and not need. I hope this has been super helpful for you
Until next time, Aloha! Shoots!