You can also use iPhoto. I just tried it and actually told it to import a 32 page pdf document. It captured the 1st page as a picture. And you can export to either jpg or png. The image editing is definitely lightweight, but it may do the job and, as you all know, it's free as can be.

For a lightweight image editor, it depends on what you mean by "lightweight". If you're focused on size, how quickly it starts up, this may not be what you're after, but I recently bought Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 from Amazon.com, for $29.

Yes, $29. There are two special offers on it right now. First, it's on their list of Summer specials, you get a mail-in rebate of $40 (this ends on Sept. 3!). When I couple that with the $30 upgrade rebate for owning v1.0, the overall cost is $29.

Photoshop Elements 2.0 includes both Mac OS and Windows versions on the same CD, and is OS 9 and OS X compatible.

Get Tinkertool It apparently has a setting that let's you choose the default filetype for captured screenshots.

Credit where it's due - I noticed this over at macosxhints.com. But you're welcome. :)

Brilliant! That's just the solution I needed -- thanks, Gabe!

If you hold down control while doing shift-cmd-4, your capture goes to the clipboard, and you can do a new image from clipboard in, for example, graphicconverter. It's easy as pie.

> defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleScreenShotFormat ImageFormat

Doesn't work in 10.2 -- tired both TIFF and tiff and in both cases, shift-cmd-4 still produced a PDF.

Edited by author 08-23-2002 12:03 PM

1. Launch Terminal.
2. Type <defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleScreenShotFormat ImageFormat> where ImageFormat is one of the 4 graphic formats (presumably something other than TIFF).
3. Logout and log back in.
   

Well. It used to work. I don't think the cat likes this tho.

Re: the idea to hack the plist file, mine is set as TIFF but they still come out as PDF's, and I'm using jag 6C115 (aka, FC1, or the GM depending on who you talk to). YMMV.

Apple's PREVIEW (which comes free with OS X) will open a PDF and save it as a TIFF...

I second the recommendation for Snapz Pro X. Not only does it let you crop before you snap the shot, the latest version lets you resize it as well, and applies sharpen filters automatically. Top notch stuff. You might not need to do any post processing in an image editor.

Funny, when I do a screen print it saves in .tiff...

Thanks, Tim -- this looks like the app I need.

Good idea, but it's not in the Jag version of that file.

In 10.1.5, you can change the screen capture file format by editing ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

Look for:
        <key>AppleScreenShotFormat</key>

And change the value, for example like this:
        <string>JPEG</string>

I'm not sure if that will carry over to Jaguar, but I'll be checking as well. I'm not fond of PDF for most uses.

Mr. Sharumpe

Cory - get Snapz Pro X [1]. It's less than GraphicConverter at $29 ($49 if you want to capture QuickTime movies of your screen). Save your screen captures as .bmp, .gif, .jpg, .pdf, .pict, .png, .psd, or .tiff, scale as you capture, apply drop shadows, fade edges to black or white, easy peasy.

TinkerTool for Jaguar won't let you change the default screenshot format.

GraphicConverter won't read PDFs.

Good tip -- I haven't used GraphicConverter since OS 7.5, but it was great then

Use GhostScript..

And there's always lemkesoft's GraphicConverter, which can change just about any format to any other format. Cheap, and it's been around just about forever (meaning that it's been thoroughly debugged).

Edited by author 08-20-2002 02:36 AM
If you don't mind the command line there's also

apt-get install imagemagick

which lets you check, convert and do batch transformation on almost any file format known to man, using the commands "identify", "convert" and "mogrify". So:

convert fred.pdf jim.png

You can do automatic resizing, colour changing, cropping and all that jazz too. There's a "display" front end too, but that's in X-Windows. It's may a bit fiddly for what you need here. If you ever need batch stuff doing, though, it's the bees knees. I have a program which just looks in a folder and converts whatever's there into PNG format, then crushes the hell out of it.

Also, you can always open the PDF in Preview.app and then export to JPG/TIFF/whatever.

I agree it's kind of weird, although when you take a screenshot of a multiscreen system, you at least get each screen on a different PDF "page". :)

Edited by author 08-20-2002 12:46 AM
Correction! He does have a version of Tinkertool that works with the developer version of Jaguar - I would assume that means a final is due when Jaguar hits the streets...

PERFECT! Thanks, Neil.

Edited by author 08-20-2002 12:43 AM
Hey, Cory -

You can change the default filetype that OS X does screencaptures with using the free Preference Pane Tinkertool. It also can access a bunch of very helpful hidden OS X preferences... very useful.

Get it at versiontracker, or from the developer's site.

Edit: Crap. My brain conveniently forgot the magic word "Jaguar". Hopefully the developer gets this working on Jaguar...