How to Eliminate Drop Shadows in Screenshots
You probably know about the keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot of a portion of the screen: Command-Shift-4. […] Less well known is the fact that if, instead of dragging out a rectangle, you press the Space bar, your cursor becomes a camera, and placing it over a window, dialog, or dropped-down menu highlights that object. Click the highlighted object and you get a screenshot of just that object, complete with drop shadow, on your Desktop.
But what if you don’t want the drop shadow? Easy. Instead of clicking the highlighted object, Option-click. That produces the same screenshot with no drop shadow.
What if you never want a drop shadow on your screenshots (like us)? In that case, you need to fire up the Terminal app.
He also presents a Quartz Composition filter for adding borders to screenshots that don’t have drop shadows.
Man, I wish I’d known about Option-clicking the camera cursor years ago! Thanks for pointing out it/the TidBITS article.