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When I first moved to Mac OS X, I knew I would have to figure out how to do a screen capture. This is done in the Windows PC world by ALT+Print Screen to capture the active window, or Shift+Print Screen to capture the entire desktop.

There are several ways in the Mac OS X world to do the same thing. Here are a few suggestions:

To capture the entire desktop, press Command-Shift-3. The screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.

To copy the entire desktop, press Command-Control-Shift-3. The screen shot will be placed on your clipboard for you to paste into another program. This is equivalent to Shift+Print Screen in Windows.

To capture a portion of the desktop, press Command-Shift-4. A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. When you release the mouse button, the screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop.

To capture a specific application window, press Command-Shift-4, then press the Spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera, and you can move it around the screen. As you move the cursor over an application window, the window will be highlighted. The entire window does not need to be visible for you to capture it. When you have the cursor over a window you want to capture, just click the mouse button and the screen shot will be saved as a PNG file on your desktop. You can also press Command-Control-Shift-4 to get the same functionality as ALT+Print Screen

You can also use a built-in program called Grab, which is located by default under Applications –> Utilities. Grab saves captures by default in TIFF format, and is more robust by doing things such as timed captures and capturing mouse activity.