Hidden Power of biult in Screen Capture utility "Grab"

i was just playing around with the built in screen capture utility "Grab" and just disovered a little more functionality I was not aware of.

with the ⌘+Shift+4 option, you can drag a cropping area on the screen to capture an image, or even press space and capture an individual window.

But did you know with that same option you can capture almost every individual thing on the screen buy itself? with correct Alpha blending? The menu bar, menu bar icons, the dock, desktop icons, other icons, the desktop wallpaper, etc. pretty cool stuff.

not the greatest thing ever but still pretty cool nonetheless.

 

Yeah. Quartz was a wonderful idea for Apple. I believe all windows are kept intact on the GPU RAM and then composited, overlapped, shadowed, etc on the fly depending on user input. This presumably allows Grab to capture a screenshot at any step along the process, from individual windows before compositing to the final composited output screen.

In contrast, the GDI system used in Windows before Aero, only seems to remember the final composited screen output. So you couldn't select individual constituent windows because GDI doesn't retain information on them.

 

The individual window grabs + intact shadowing is nice. Its one of those cool built-in apple apps that you love to discovery.

 

I don't get it. Sounds like you figured out the capture tool... captures things? I mean... yeah?

 

I did a search when I first got my MacBook on how to do a screen capture and found this exact info.

 

i was just letting it be known that you can actually capture individual elements, not just windows, and the entire screen, I wasn't aware of this, I am sure there are a few people who also weren't, no big deal, like I already mentioned in my original post.

I have known about the grab app for years, I just didn't know it could do that, I am sorry if I have offended anyone, I apologize.

Also, since I have offended so many ^_^, I thought I would mention that it is also possible to do a timed screen grab. where that would be useful I am not sure, but it is possible.

 

http://www.app4mac.com/

Sequence seems really promising, and it does very nice looking video captures.

$20, but, the video capture alone is worth that.

 

When you need a few seconds to make sure you get a few windows arranged correctly.