10 Screenshot Markup Tips and Tricks

You can do a lot with the built-in screenshot tool on your Mac. Learn how to draw perfect shapes, highlight areas, use Emoji, save where you want and much more.


Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you ten tips and tricks for marking up your screenshots on your Mac.
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So I get a lot of questions about screenshots and whether or not they can be marked up on a Mac. You could do that using the default Screenshot Tool. A lot of people might think you need to get third party apps to do some of this. I'm going to show you the basics and also ten tips and tricks.
First let's take a screenshot. I'm going to go to a webpage here and let's say I want to take a screenshot of a lot of its content and mark it up. So, I'm going to use the default shortcut Shift Command and 5 to bring up the Screenshot Tool which you'll see down here. Of course you can customize that keyboard shortcut so if it is not working for you check in System Settings. Now you can either capture the entire screen, capture a window, or capture a selected portion of the screen. I'm going to capture a portion just to make it simpler and I'm going to move the box around and position it over this area here. Now under Options I need to select one of the options to Save the screenshot to a folder. So you've got Desktop & Documents. You can also choose other locations. Also, you want to make sure Show Floating Thumbnails is turned On. When you do that, you capture, and you get the screenshot appearing as a thumbnail at the bottom right. Click that before it goes away! Now it brings up the screenshot for you to Preview it.
Let's get rid of the Safari window here so we can see it a little clearer and we just have the screenshot area.
You can do things with it now before it is actually saved. So I can click the Trashcan icon here to just Delete it and try again. I can click the Share button to share it without saving it. I can click Done and it will then save to that location. I can also click the Markup Tool here. So I want to click the Markup Tool and now I can mark it up. Now if you have ever used it before you probably know some of the basics. You can click the drawing tool here and then draw on the screenshot. I can use Command Z to Undo anything and I'm going to use that a lot here. You can use one of the shapes here. So you can, say, draw a circle and you can position the circle, you can resize it. You've got Line Thickness here. You've got the Line Color. You've got the Fill Color so I can make this a fill with a certain color like that. One of the shapes you can draw is, of course, arrows. So you can draw an arrow and point it toward where you want.
You can also click the Text Tool and then type some text. So just type something like that and then reposition it, resize it. You've got text options here and you can have text on there like that. Those are the basics. But let's look at some additional tricks that you may not know about.
One is if you use the first tool here, which is called Sketch. You may wonder what the difference between Draw and Sketch is. Well Draw just let's you draw whatever you want on the screenshot. But Sketch will try to interpret what you draw and make it a perfect shape. So if I draw a circle like that you could see how it converts it into a circle. Now I can go over here and I can go back to the actual drawing or I can use that perfect shape and it will follow my settings here for Fill and Line Color. Now it works with other shapes as well. So, for instance, if I draw a triangle, like this, it converts it to a triangle. A box converts to a rectangle. Even star, like that, will convert to a star. You can also draw an arrow this way and just draw a little arrowhead like that and it will convert it to an arrow. Just a regular line works as well and even a curve. So you don't have to use the Shape Tools to actually get the shapes. You can draw and do it that way.
Now if you want to point something out and label it you may be used to drawing an arrow and a piece of text and positioning them both to point to an item and say what you want to say. But you can do that with one element. You can do it with a Bubble. Now, a text bubble like this you can double-click on it and type something in here. But you could also click and drag the green dot there to position this. To point to whatever you want. The other green dot can actually be positioned to make this a very narrow line like that. You reposition and move this around to point to wherever you want and create more and use this as an annotation tool rather than both both an arrow and some text.
Now if you want to highlight just one area of the screenshot you can do so using this special tool right here at the bottom of the Shapes. This will draw a rectangle. Everything outside the rectangle is kind of grayed out. Everything inside the rectangle is regular brightness. So, I can position it to be a very small area here. Strangely you don't grab inside but outside of this to actually move it around. So you can move it to where you want to highlight one thing in the document.
Now on the other hand if you want to eliminate something you can do that by using a rectangle here and let's go and set it to No Line but say a black rectangle. So you can kind of crossout something like that and just place those there. Since this is an image those pixels will actually be replaced and there's no way to see what is behind that.
Alternatively you could make this the same color as the background.
Now you can also use another special tool here called a Loupe.This gives you a circle and you can position it anywhere you want. Then you can drag the blue dot to make it bigger or smaller and the green dot to adjust the magnification. So you can focus on something in the document like that. You could add more than one loupe if you want to point out multiple things.
We talked about adding text and you can certainly use text here to, you know, type something and place it somewhere and position it. But one thing you may not thought of is you can use any text in there. So I can use fn or the Globe Key and e or Control Command and Space to bring up the Emoji & Special Character viewer. I can put anyone of the different emoji symbols here. So you can pick something that kind of makes sense. Like, for instance, maybe use a little hand pointing at something and place it there. You may want to make it bigger so I'm going to change the size and go all the way up to 200 and let's increase the box there. Now I've got a cool little graphic that I can use to point something out instead of the regular arrow. Any emoji will work. So, you've got tons of emoji here. But you also have tons of Special Symbols as well. So you can use all these different Special Symbols, like different arrows and shapes and math symbols. All sorts of things. You could, of course, at the top here Search for what you want. So I can search for X, for instance, and get this red X or green box X. I can search for check and get checkmarks that I can add. I can search Edit and there is some editing symbols. All sorts of things.
Now if you want to make this standout even more note that you can even go to the Lines function here. Of course you can't change the line thickness of the text but you can use this last tool at the bottom which is to put a shadow underneath it. So you can see it puts a shadow underneath this. That works for regular text and that works for emoji. So if you need your text to stand out a bit, add a shadow.
Another thing you could do is you could easily duplicate items. So you saw how many steps it took to add this little emoji here. But if I were to Option Drag, i would get a duplicate of it. I could also, of course, select it, Copy, and then Paste. But Option Dragging makes it so easy and it works for anything. So, for instance, if you create an arrow and you've got this arrow here and you want to just reuse it you could Option Drag it and create as many arrows as you want. The same thing for all the different shapes. Even for things that you draw on your own, like that. You could Option Drag to make a copy of it.
Now when I'm done here I can click Done and it will Save. In this case it is going to save a png file. But what if I wanted to save it to some other location, maybe change its name, maybe use another file type. Well the way to do that is when you bring up the Tool here, change your options to go to Preview instead of to a Folder. Now when you capture it won't show you the thumbnail but will open Preview and create an untitled document that isn't saved that gives you the same options that the regular screenshot tool does. It is just now in Preview. So, I can, for instance, go to Markup Tools here and mark this up with something. Like I can add a circle here, for instance. Maybe an arrow as well. Then I can position these and do what I want. BUT now there is no Done button to Save. Instead you would do File, and then Save or just Command S. At this point I can choose the name I want. I can set the location. If you don't see all these options here you probably need to click this little button which reveals them all. I can change the Format and Save it as a jpeg, for instance.
There is also another way to get to Preview. If you do the Screenshot like this. Let's set the options back to saving to a folder. So now I capture. I have to click the Thumbnail and now let's say at this point I decide I want to go to Preview. Let's even mark it up a little bit first. I will create a circle here for instance and maybe also an arrow. So now I've got some markup going there. At this point if I decide, oh I don't want to save it as a regular png, I want to do something else with it in Preview. Well, I can click the Share button here and I can choose Preview to share it to. Notice I also have lots of other great options here. For instance I can go right to Notes, right to Reminders, right to a new Mail message, right to Messages all without saving it. But if I go to Preview it will open Preview up and I get everything including the markup items I put here. So now at this point I can do a Command S and save it as a jpeg at another location with another name.
Hope you found all of these Screenshot Markup tips and tricks useful. Thanks for watching.
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