I was talking to a friend yesterday about how I use a combination of the screen capture feature on my Mac combined with Apple’s iPhoto to help me organise ideas for future shoots, images I like, nice lighting, web design, cool colour schemes, interesting typography and anything else that I find on the web that might help inspire an idea sometime. Kind of like a digital scrapbook. I thought some of the information I gave him might be useful here.
As I said, I like to take screenshots of cool stuff I see on the web but there are quite a few different ways to do this.
Command + Shift + 3: Captures the entire screen.
Command + Shift + 4: Turns your cursor turns into a cross-hair. This then allows you to select the specific area you want to capture.
Command + Shift + 4, then hit Space: Holding down Command + Shift + 4 turns your cursor into a cross-hair. By hitting the space bar once it will turn the cross-hair into a camera icon. This allows you to capture any opened windows.
TIP: If you want your screenshot to be copied to the clipboard instead (so you can paste it into Photoshop) just add the CTRL key into the key commands above i.e. Command + CTRL+ Shift + 3.
The default format for screen captures in OSX is .PNG (Portable Network Graphics) but these files tend to be a little on the large side compared to JPEGs. You can change the default format using your Mac’s Terminal utility by typing in these 2 commands.
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
killall SystemUIServer
Make sure you include the second command ‘killall SystemUIServer‘ as this restarts the part of the system that includes screen captures and makes your changes active.
By using Apple’s iPhoto I then have the ability to organise my screenshots into something a little more manageable by creating albums for the various types of inspiration I might need. This makes it extremely easy to find ‘inspiration’ for a certain project when required. Another major plus for me is that I can then sync iPhoto with my iPhone, allowing me to have all these ideas in my pocket at all times. Very handy…
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