Remove Drop Shadow from Screenshot

Remove the drop shadow from Apple's screenshot application.

January 15, 2016 by cryan.com

Skitch is a really cool screen capture program that I use as part of my QA toolbox. Screen capture helps put a visual in the bug/feature that I am reporting.

However, every now and then I'll need to use Apple's built in screen capture utility to capture a window. It's really easy to do just type in Command-Shift-4. Move the cursor over the window or menu that I want to capture and then click on the space bar.

A downsides of using this for a screenshot is Apple adds a drop shadow to the image. This can be a problem if you are combining images together. (Plus the image is slightly bigger.)

Fortunately there is a quick hack to remove the screenshot drop shadow.

Open up Terminal Application and Type in:

Hit return, and then type in:

Now you can quit out of Terminal and all the window and menu bar screen shots will not have a drop shadow. If you want to re-enable the drop shadow, simply type in:

Hit return, and then type in: