You are correct.  There are many ways to do this; some are built into Mac OS X and some are third party applications.  Two of my favorites are Snapz Pro and Screensteps.

With Snapz Pro you can capture all of the screen, just the foremost open window, sections of the window and save them as almost any image format, jpg, pdf etc as well as do some basic effects to the image and you can name each and every screen capture so that you can find them easily.  We will be covering Snapz Pro in detail in another post.

ScreenSteps, which is the application I use most to create the content for this blog is a lesson creation application which has a built in screen capture utility.  One of the cool things about this application is that each time you take a snapshot, it creates another step in the lesson. More on ScreenSteps in another post.

This post will detail how to use the built-in screen capture utility in Mac OS X.  Actually OS X has three built-in ways of doing screen captures; via keyboard commands, the Grab utility and via the command line.

 

Keyboard Commands

By far the easiest method of grabbing screen shots is by using the built in keyboard short cuts.  I will show you two of my favorites.

 

Capture a Section of a Screen

The first allows you to “drag” a box around just the area you need to capture.  When you find the screen you wish to capture, hold down the Command key (Apple) and the Shift Keys together and then click the 4 key.  This will produce a crosshair cursor.

 

Click and hold that cursor in one corner of the area that you want to capture and drag it to the diagonal corner of that area and then let go of the mouse clicker.  Once you let go of the clicker, that section of the screen will be captured into a file and placed on your desktop labeled Picture 1.  If you capture more than one … each subsequent file will be named Picture 2, Picture 3 etc.

 

Opening the resulting file, Picture 1, you can see that only the area I selected was captured into the file.

 

 

Capture an Entire Window

 

By using the command show above (Command + Shift + 4) and then clicking on the space bar, you will see the cursor change into a camera icon.  Once you see the camera icon, click your mouse button again to capture the entire open window.

 

As you can see, the entire window is now captured.  This is a great tool for capturing menus.  Simply open the menu you want, click command + shift + 4 and then the space bar and you have captured the menu and only the menu. Pretty cool huh! :-)