Mike Shannon

For web development purposes, I often need to use the “print screen” function on my windows keyboard to copy the contents of my screen to memory and then paste it into photoshop. Right now, I’m using OS X at work and use a mac keyboard but I also have parallels installed so that I can run windows along side by OS X install (parallels is awesome by the way and I will probably write an entire post about it).

My problem is since I use the max keyboard, there is no “print screen” function key built in - this is not a problem - just hit F13 on the mac keyboard and it acts just like the windows “print screen” key.

Below is an image containing reference to the print screen key on a mac keyboard and the same print screen key on a PC keyboard - both used for printing in parallels and stand alone windows respectively.

If you’re on OS X and need to get a screen capture sent to memory, just do a:

“apple command” + “shift” + “Control” + “the number 3”

and you’ll have that photo sent to ram. You could also do the above key combination without the “Control” key to have the screen capture sent to your desktop.Here is a handy primer on OS X keyboard shortcuts that goes into greater detail on how to do things on a mac.