Craig Knows Things

Saving a screenshot on the desktop.

• Command+Shift+3: This will take a picture of the entire screen.
• Command+Shift+4: This turns your mouse into a crosshairs. To take the screenshot just click where you’re like to begun your picture, hold the click and drag, let go when you have a rectangle over the area.
• Command+Shift+4, then space: Your mouse will turn into a picture of a camera. The camera will take a screenshot of a window. By pressing space again the camera will turn back into a crosshairs.

Video example of making screenshots

Copying a screenshot to the clipboard.

(The clipboard is the place things go when you copy them, once in the clibboard they can easily be pasted into various programs such as word)

• Command+Control+Shift+3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it to the clipboard.
• Command+Control+Shift+4: This turns your mouse into a crosshairs. To take the screenshot just click where you’re like to begun your picture, hold the click and drag, let go when you have a rectangle over the area.
• Command+Control+Shift+4, then space: Your mouse will turn into a picture of a camera. The camera will take a screenshot of a window. By pressing space again the camera will turn back into a crosshairs.

These files will all save in a format called PNG if you’re using Tiger or Leopard. If you’re using Panther it’ll be PDF and if you’re using Jaguar it’ll be JPG.

To choose which file you’d prefer to save them there’s a neat hack.

Open the application called terminal located in the utilities folder which is located in the applications folder.

/Applications/Utilities/Terminal

Type the following two commands into the terminal window and press enter after each:

“defaults write com.apple.screencapture type image_format“

then

“killall SystemUIServer”

 

image_format above can be whatever you’d like it to be; jpg, tiff, pdf, png, bmp and others.

Video Example of Changing the File Type in the Terminal Application

Do you take a lot of pictures with photobooth? If so you may want to check this out. 

Here’s how I did it.

The first step was to start up photoshop CS3 and get all of the photos for the animation into one photoshop file.

file–>scripts–>load files into stack 

Next I examined the layers and the order they were in. I rearranged the layers that weren’t in correct order until they were… From there I opened up the animation window since it wasn’t already available to me

window–>animation

From the animation palette I chose the funny little button at the top right which gives the user more options. If the palette is in the weird timeline mode that I don’t understand use the funny button and choose to convert to frame animation.

Next use the funny button and choose “create new layers from each frame”

Now you have an animation. You can select all of the frames in the animation and change how long they last at the same time. I chose .2 seconds. next you can arrange the frames if you’d like Lastly you’ll want to export it. You have a few options… like a HUGE gif file… or you could make a video like I did.

file–>export–>render video 

There you go… the first video I rendered was 166mb which is a bit large. It probably would have been a good idea to change around the QuickTime settings before rendering. Instead of going back to remake the video I ran the file through a program called visual hub and had it make a good quality h.264 file. That file ended up being 4megs.