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No more blurry screenshots on a Mac

If you have taken screenshots on your Mac with CMD SHIFT 4 (or 5), you will have seen that most of the screenshots do not have much detail and are in fact a bit blurry. This is caused by Mac OSX, making by defaults the screenshots in JPEG format. JPEG -unlike for example PNG- is a loosy compressed image format that is great for photo's but not too good for screenshots.

To change this, open a terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png
killall SystemUIServer

From now and, screenshots will be in the PNG format, better for making screenshots.

A very good tip found on creativebits

By bertboerland at 09/07/2008 - 10:06 | Apple | english | picture | bertboerland's blog | 350 reads

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Snapz Pro X

I have been using Snapz Pro X (was part of MacHeist 2) which defaults to png for screenshots I think (either that or it was the first thing I changed in the settings Eye-wink )

works like a charm Smiling

By stefan (not verified) at Wed, 09/07/2008 - 12:09pm | reply

You should try this thing

You should try this thing called "OS X" (that's OS 10) Yeah, It's made by a company called Apple (yeah, like the fruit). Their screen shots have been in PNG format since OS 10.0
They sure have.

But thanks for the tip on how to undo whatever it is that you must have done to your system to change the default format to JPEG. If my computer ever starts saving shots as JPEG for some mysterious reason, I'll know hoe to get it back to PNG.

By kritsch-AVRO-lid (not verified) at Wed, 09/07/2008 - 8:43pm | reply

Great Tip for older OS X users...

10.4 and 10.5 both use png as the default screenshot format. If yours was jpeg then something wonky must have happened. Great tip though because you can change it to PDF, like 10.3, or some other formats like tiff with this command.

By PaulG (not verified) at Wed, 09/07/2008 - 9:08pm | reply

OnyX

If the Terminal scares you, you can use the app OnyX to do this and a bunch of other neat things.

By lantzn (not verified) at Thu, 10/07/2008 - 1:04am | reply

Interesting default name

Interesting default name there, I'll leave it.

The default screenshot key-combos are cmd+shift+3 and cmd+shift+4 (not 5.)

The default format on 10.4 and 10.5 is png (not jpg.) Png is still lossy, though not as bad as jpg. If you want lossless screenshots you should use tiff.

By kritsch-AVRO-lid (not verified) at Thu, 10/07/2008 - 5:24am | reply

Excellent! Thanks for the

Excellent! Thanks for the tip.

By Partners in Grime (not verified) at Sun, 13/07/2008 - 6:26am | reply

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