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Screen capture as PNG on OSX

By default, OSX captures screenshots in the Finder as TIFF. You can customize this behavior so that the screenshots are saved as PNG. Open up your terminal and hit the following command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type -string "png"

Other options are allowed: BMP, GIF, JPG, PDF, TIFF.

An other nice move is to place your screenshots directly on your desktop:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location -string "$HOME/Desktop"

And if you want to remove the shadow from the captured windows, just use the following stance:

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

Now, to take advantage of screen capture in your Finder, you can use the following key combinations:

• ⌘+⇧+3: Capture the whole screen.
• ⌘+⇧+4: Capture a selection of screen, end the selection via ␣ (the SPACE bar key).

As a nice tip, you can alter the saving behavior with ⌃ (the ctrl key) so that all your screenshots ends up in your clipboard instead of your Desktop.