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How to Take Prettier Screenshots on a Mac

How to Take Prettier Screenshots on a Mac
Credit: David Murphy

If you’re a Mac user clipping an image of a bit of text to send in a tweet or saving info from a rental car confirmation page, the standard Command-Shift-4 shortcut that allows you to draw a box around what you want to capture is more than adequate. But your computer is much more savvy than that: There are plenty of other ways to take a screenshot that are just as easy but result in a much prettier final product, and they can make all the difference when you want to, say, include a professional-looking image of your company’s webpage in a presentation deck.

Capture a Window With a Border and Drop Shadow

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Border + drop shadow Credit: Melissa Kirsch

To capture a window with a white border and gray shadow, offering a three-dimensional effect, press Command-Shift-4, then press the spacebar. When your cursor turns into a little camera, select the window you want to capture. Once it is highlighted in a wash of blue tint, click to capture the image.


Capture a Window Without a Border or Shadow

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Window without border or shadow Credit: Melissa Kirsch

If you’re feeling wishy-washy after you follow the above steps, you don’t have to live with that fancy border. To capture the contents of a window sans drop a border and drop shadow, press Command-Shift-4 and then the spacebar as above. Once your selected window has that bluish tint to it, hold down the Option key before clicking for a clean, two-dimensional capture.

Disable Drop Shadows Forever via Terminal

If you never, ever want to take a screenshot with a drop shadow, you can disable this feature permanently. Pull up Terminal and type in the following (with thanks to Andrew Orr for the code):

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

Hit Enter, then type in the command below and hit Enter one more time:

killall SystemUIServer

To revert back, simply type the first command in again, change the final “true” to“false,” hit Enter, and run the “killall” command again.



As is true of all macOS screen captures, if you want to copy your selection rather than save it as an image, add the Control key into the mix. For example, Command-Control-Shift-4 lets you draw a box around an area on your screen and copies your selection to the clipboard instead of dumping it to your desktop. Hold down those same keys, release, and press the spacebar to select a specific window—and use our aforementioned steps to add (or remove) a border as you see fit.

If all this keyboard maneuvering is giving you carpal tunnel, you can always use Command-Shift-5 in macOS Mojave or later to open up a simple interface that allows you to select what you want to screenshot. You won’t be able to pick whether your screenshot gets a pretty drop shadow or not—at least, not unless you hold down the Option key to remove it when taking a screenshot of a window—but you’ll be able to choose from a number of other options, from dictating where your image will be saved, to setting up a timer for your screenshot, to including or excluding the mouse cursor, et cetera.


This article was originally published in 2018 by Melissa Kirsch and updated on April 8, 2020 by David Murphy. Our updates include the following: Adding additional links to relevant information, changing featured image, revising portions of the article to clarify the author’s original information and adding up-to-date advice for taking screenshots and tweaking macOS settings.