It’s been bugging me that every time I create instructions for one of our clients the screen shots come with a shadow around them, after trying a few things I have finally found a solution for it!
First, let’s take a screen shot so we can compare them later.
To do this, use Command+Shift+4 to take a shot of an individual window, notice the shadow around the frame of the window.
Disable it by
To disable it you just need to edit the com.apple.screencapture plist with the defaults command in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true
For the changes to take effect you will need to either log out then log in, or restart SystemUIServer by killing it:
killall SystemUIServer
You can now take another screen capture of an individual window using Command+Shift+4 and the screen shot will not include the window shadow.
If you want to revert back just change the command to false instead of true:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false