How can I take a snapshot of the screen?

Do you use Shift-Command-3 to capture your Mac screen from time to time? That's the basic way to take a picture of the whole screen - or if you have two screens, it'll save each screen to its own image file. But what if you only want to capture a part of the screen, or if you want to capture just one particular window? Do you need a separate utility program to do that? What if you want to save a picture of the screen to the clipboard or to a JPG file instead of the default PNG file?

The answers to all these questions and more are provided in an excellent MacFixit article. PLUS, don't forget that you can always get help from the Finder's Help menu; just type in the words "screen capture" to see the Help article entitled: "Shortcuts for taking pictures of the screen".

Hint: you won't need any commercial utility - it's all built-in to Mac OS X! Explore even more possibilities with Mac OS X's free Grab utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder). Read about it in the Finder's Help Center by searching for "Grab".