Ever since upgrading to Leopard, I was surprised to find that screen captures of windows now include a drop shadow. If you’re not familiar with OS X’s built-in screencap utility, you can hit cmd-shift-3 to grab the full screen, cmd-shft-4 to get selection crosshairs, and if you use cmd-shift-4 then hit the spacebar, you’ll be able to grab any screen elements (windows, menus, etc.). In Tiger, the latter method would grab just the window, and in Leopard, it grabs the window plus its drop shadow. I found this extremely annoying, because I often need to put together instruction sheets for users, and I found I was always having to crop-out the shadow.

Since Leopard was released, I would occasionally google to try to find a solution to this problem, but have never been able to find a fix. Until today, when I had an epiphany. OS X has a command line screen capture tool. “Perhaps I’ll find a clue there,” I thought. Sure enough – pay dirt. Look what I found in the man page…