In my previous post, you’ll see a screengrab of a PC88 emulator running on my Mac. hat you don’t see, is the 50 pixels or so of drop-shadow and transparency that Apple decided Leopard should add to window grabs not only as a default, but with no option to turn them off. Exactly why they thought everyone would need drop-shadows on every window they take a snapshot of, I don’t really know.
The type of grab I’m talking about is the one I use most often: press Shift-Cmd-4, then tap Space and click on the window you want a picture of. In Leopard (at least, Leopard on my iMac but strangely not on my MacBook), you get this:
It looks fancy and stuff, but makes the image so much wider and taller. For the picture in the last post, I cropped it out manually using Preview.
Thankfully, I’ve found three solutions. None are perfect, but at least I don’t have to do the cropping any more.
1) Use Grab. It’s installed in Applications somewhere, and offers much the same functionality as the normal hotkey-based grabber, but doesn’t add the shadow effect. It also doesn’t save the image to the desktop instantly, which is a slight faff.
2) Use this script here.  This means running a script before the grab, which takes away the simplicity of the hotkey option, but you could always add it to a menu or dock or hotkey or something.
3) Trigger screencapture from the terminal with the command “screencapture -io”. The i says “choose what to grab” and the o says “don’t do the shadow thing”.
