MacOS – Mac (OS X 10.9.2) no longer saving screen shots

macosscreen capture

When I try to take a screen shot (Command + Control + Shift + 4) I hear the camera shutter sound but no image appears on my desktop.

I Googled the problem and tried to change the saving location using the terminal command line as such:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop/

but this did not change anything.

Would anyone know what I can do to fix?

Best Answer

When I try to take a screen shot (Command + Control + Shift + 4)

That's the problem. The shortcut to put a screenshot on the desktop is just Command + Shift + 4 (or 3). Don't press the control key; when you do, it copies to the clipboard instead. That's why you're not getting a file on the desktop.

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Easy way to take a screen shot that’s NOT color corrected

The fact that the monitor's profile gets embedded is the only way the OS can preserve the appearance of colors in your photos. If you open a photo in Photoshop, take a screen capture (let's say for now via the built-in OS tool), then open this screen shot in Photoshop (and preserve the profile in the file) and compare both side to side, then you will see that the colors are visually similar even though the numbers for each pixel is different from one to the other.

This is all normal behavior. The colors you see on your screen on a calibrated and profiled monitor is actually raw values sent by the OS to the graphics card which then "assigns" the monitor profile to the values in real time so that the colors look like they should on the monitor. This is the simple explanation of course, there is much more going on in the background.

In the color management world there is only 2 options when you wish to play around with colors and profiles: assign or convert colors. When switching from one color space to another (i.e. from RGB to CMYK), your only option is convert since the laws of physics apply here. Within the same color space, if you assign profiles (or remove them, i.e. assigning nothing) you preserve the numbers while sacrificing (to various degrees) the appearance of the colors. When converting, you preserve the appearance of the colors while sacrificing the numbers in the file.

In your case, you need to convert the screen shot to a device-independent profile like Adobe RGB, or a device-dependent but easy to play with like sRGB. You can do that in Photoshop or Preview, as long as you do convert and not assign. Removing the profile is not really helping, since the numbers will have no meaning...

MacOS – Pasting clipped screen capture into osx email can’t be seen by recipients

The default file type for screencaps in OS X is .png format. Perhaps your recipients' email readers cannot process .png files.

You can change the default file type by executing these commands in Terminal.

To change the default format to JPEG, for example, use these commands:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
killall SystemUIServer

Other formats you can choose: gif, pdf and tiff.

Best Answer

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Easy way to take a screen shot that’s NOT color corrected

MacOS – Pasting clipped screen capture into osx email can’t be seen by recipients

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