Remove the shadow from Mac Screen Grabs

March 26th, 2009

When you take a screenshot in OSX Leopard (Apple Shift 4 or Apple Shift 4 SpaceBar) you get a large outer shadow appear when you then view that image in Preview or Photoshop. It can be really useful to remove that shadow when you want to take screengrabs for presentations.

To remove it open Terminal (Applications/Utilities) and copy and paste this code:

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

followed by this:

killall SystemUIServer

To get the shadow back copy and paste this:

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

followed by:

killall SystemUIServer