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angelmb · Dec 12, 2009, 07:14 AM

I use to rely on Voila, but sometimes OS X built-in shortcuts are enough, if only the outcome didn't look something something something dark.

My only guess was to delete the highlighted file shown below to not avail.

In before of easy joke, my desktop is not black and I don't intend to set it as such.

Guesses?. Thanks.

ibook_steve · Dec 14, 2009, 12:07 PM

So what key sequence are you using? cmd-shift-3 gets the whole screen and cmd-shift-4 lets you select an area of the screen. Or are you using Grab?

Steve

angelmb · Dec 14, 2009, 02:29 PM

cmd-shift-4 then tap the space bar to capture a given window

Same thing happens when I use Voila to capture a window.

imitchellg5 · Dec 14, 2009, 02:51 PM

Curious. Is this 10.5 or 10.6? And do you have the preference pane "Secrets" installed?

angelmb · Dec 14, 2009, 05:13 PM

Sorry about the lack of detailed info, it is 10.6.2, I don't have the aforementioned Secrets preference pane.
Only thing I can remotely think about is having ran OnyX to get the screenshots as JPG files, albeit I have been doing that even before Columbus arrived in the New World with no issue at all.

angelmb · Dec 14, 2009, 05:21 PM

Well, once I change the format back to the default PNG, the issue is gone, if I choose the format as JPEG 2000 the issue is gone as well, if my choice is JPG the issue is back.

CharlesS · Dec 14, 2009, 05:32 PM

That must be why the JPEG option was never exposed in the preferences.

Chuckit · Dec 14, 2009, 05:38 PM

Actual explanation of "why": The screencapture tool captures the shadow around the window as well as its content. This shadow is translucent, but JPEG doesn't support transparency, so it comes through as a black smudge. JPEG2000 and PNG do support transparency.

Art Vandelay · Dec 14, 2009, 05:53 PM

And the capturing of the shadow began with Leopard.

imitchellg5 · 10:52 PM

Okay, so earlier today I started fooling around with this, and now PNG is doing it too... what have I done???

EDIT: This is so weird. The file is PNG and everything.... WTF?

imitchellg5 · Dec 14, 2009, 11:33 PM

Okay, this is really weird. If you look here, there is the border. But if you look here, it's as it should be.

Art Vandelay · Dec 14, 2009, 11:40 PM

Because the full size image is a PNG and all the others are JPEGs.

imitchellg5 · Dec 14, 2009, 11:46 PM

Why would the smaller be a JPEG? It's saved as PNG.

Art Vandelay · Dec 14, 2009, 11:56 PM

When Flickr creates smaller image samples from the original, they are saved as JPEGs.

Chuckit · Dec 15, 2009, 12:36 AM

The original was saved as a PNG. You didn't save the resized versions yourself.

hab · Dec 16, 2009, 03:27 AM

Here's a tip from Leopard 2008:

http://www.tipstrs.com/tip/4305/Take...no-drop-shadow

Take screen shots with no drop shadow

A new feature in Leopard is that when you take a screen shot of a window using Shift + Command + 4 then hitting the Space bar and clicking on a window, the screen shot includes the drop shadow of the window. This generally makes the screen shot look nicer. But depending on how you plan to use your screen shot, the drop shadow can be a problem. If you want to take screen shots of entire windows without having the drop shadow, here's how to do it.

Open up a terminal window and enter this command:

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

You then need to log out for this change to take effect. But after that, your screen shots will no longer include drop shadow.

If you decide that you want the drop shadow back again, repeat the command but replace the true at the end of the command with false.