You may already know how to take screen or a portion of the screen in Mac OS X. You can press ⌘,Shift,3 keys to capture the entire screen or ⌘,Shift,4 to capture a rectangular portion of the screen. By default the screenshots will be stored as .png files. But you can easily change the default settings anytime and can save the screenshots as .jpg, .pdf, .gif or .tiff file format. Here, first we have changed the default settings to save the screenshots as .pdf files later we have changed it to .jpg.

As per your requirements you may change the default format anytime:

The most common photo file type is the JPEG file. To change the default screenshot format from PNG to JPG, simply type the following command into Terminal and press Enter: defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg; killall SystemUIServer. You can now try capturing a screenshot on your Mac using the Command + Shift + 3 combo.

Capture Mac screen with full screen or browser window. Save Mac screenshot picture as PNG, JPG, JPEG, BMP, GIF or TIFF. Add rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow, callout, text and more in any size and color to your screenshot. Safe, clean and totally free to use. No registration or hidden purchase. How to change the screenshot file format on your Mac. The first step is to launch Terminal. Open your Applications folder by pressing Shift-⌘-A on the keyboard while the Finder is active. Next, navigate to the Utilities sub-folder and open Terminal. Alternatively, use Spotlight to launch Terminal. Alternatively, control-click the screenshot, select Open With and select Preview. Select File on the menu bar and select Export to PDF. Rename the file in the “Save as” dialog, tap the “Where” drop-down option to select where you want the file saved, and select Save. Convert Screenshot to JPG on Mac. Rehashing screenshots to JPG on.

.jpg/.png: Suitable for web uploads or for using in blog posts.
.gif: Because of the lowest size on disk, it’s suitable as resources of .css files (as it can reduce the loading time of a website).
.tiff: Suitable for Printing.
.pdf: Suitable when you are capturing Web pages, rich-documents, Capturing applications like Numbers, Pages.

Steps capture screenshot as PDF or JPEG in Mac OS X

1. Open Terminal: While you are in Finder press Shift,⌘,A to open Applications and then click on Terminal. You can also open Launchpad and search for Terminal.

2. Now in terminal run below commands to change the screen-capture format to .pdf.

How To Screenshot

Apple Print Screen

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf;
killall SystemUIServer;

Now take screenshot by pressing ⌘,Shift,3 or ⌘,Shift,4, you will find that the screenshot has been saved as a .pdf file.

run below commands to change the screen-capture format to JPEG.
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg;
killall SystemUIServer;

How To Screenshot On Mac Jpg

The process is same for .gif, .tiff or to revert back to default .png. That’s it.