How to display your desktop – hiding all open programs on the Mac
I am in ‘traveling with my Mac mode’ – I have a MacBook Air and it is so light and thin that it makes a great traveling companion – sort of like having an oversize iPad that runs Illustrator, Photoshop and Lightroom.
BUT, and there are some big buts! I use a desktop PC so little things on the Mac bite me because I simply don’t have the knowledge at my fingertips. In the last couple of days the issue has been the desktop – I need to get to some files saved there but there is all this stuff in the way. Turns out there is a shortcut key you can use – F11 – if you’re on a notebook you’ll need to use the Fn function key with this so it is Fn + F11 but that’s all you need to hide everything and show your desktop.
Now I can take my screenshots Command + Shift + 3 then hide the junk so I can see the image to drag and drop it into a Word document or into Photoshop.
Yeah! Me and my Mac are friends again.
Additional Mac screenshot tips:
* If you ALSO hold down the Shift key, it will copy the image to the Clipboard instead of saving a file. So you can then just Command-Tab to, say, Word and hit Cmd-V to Paste it straight in.
* Cmd-Shift-4 and Cmd-Ctrl-Shift 4 do the same as blah-3 but for a Selection rather than the whole screen.