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Better Screen Captures in OS X with Free Screenshot Helper

Dan Knight - 2007.08.03

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One task we do a lot at Low End Mac is make screen captures to use with our articles.

One drawback to Mac OS X is that, pretty as it looks, it creates busy backgrounds, and translucent windows make things even worse.

One solution is to forego the neat desktop images in favor of a plain background and hide everything except the active program, but you still have the problem with icons on the desktop showing up.

There's a better way of doing things. A brilliantly simple program called Screenshot Helper creates a single colored "tablecloth" that covers everything behind it: applications and the Finder. And you get to pick the color of the tablecloth.

To simplify things, mine is white. When I need to capture an application window, I launch Screenshot Helper, choose the application in the Dock to bring it to the foreground (put it on the tablecloth), and then type cmd-shift-3 to capture the whole screen or, more likely, cmd-shift-4 to select the part of the screen I want to capture.

From there it's a simple matter to open the PNG file in Preview, save it as a Photoshop file, double-click that, and work on it in Photoshop Elements 3. (At Low End Mac, we tend to avoid buying software that does more than we need, and we stick with what works until we outgrow it.)

Here's what a screen shot of Name Munger looks like with all the other apps hidden:

screen capture with Finder in background

As you can see, it's busy. But when I launch Screenshot Helper and then bring Name Munger to the front, it's much cleaner:

screen capture with Screenshot Helper

Not only is that less cluttered, it's also a smaller file that loads more quickly, reducing the load on our server and the amount of time you have to wait to see the image. In this case, the bottom image is less than half the size of the top one.

There are lesser savings when we crop to just the window we want to show you, but I'm sure you'll agree that this:

window with white background

looks nicer than this:

window with Finder in background

Again, the image with Screenshot Helper acting as a tablecoth is smaller (by about 6 KB) than the one with the Finder in the background.

If you have to do screen captures for the Web, for publication, or for presentations, you owe it to your audience to download Screenshot Helper and give it a try. (If you want an image hiding your apps and the Finder, Screenshot Helper can do that too.)

Best of all, this useful program is absolutely free.

Link: Screenshot Helper

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