Layers Review: Advanced Screen-Grabbing
- Exporting of only a few elements, and not everything
- Has some options for shadow, etc.
- Only needed for those who need PSDs or custom elements
- Only exports full snap to PSD
Screen-capturing can be a very important part of our jobs or even life. In OS X, we have a built-in screen-grabbing tool called Grab. It works well for just grabbing windows, selections and the whole screen. But, it doesn’t give you many options–Or at least, not as many as it could. Well recently, wuonm released a tool called Layers that adds a lot of functionality to screen-grabbing.
Unlike OS X’s Grab, Layers can capture every element on your screen, from your wallpaper, to your menu bar icons. But, it would be hard to select an individual menu bar icon every time you wanted to grab it, so they did something never seen before: They have allowed you to capture your screen as a PSD file. This means that every object on your screen is in a separate window, and they are even grouped by type (menu bar, desktop, apps). To do this, all you have to do is go to File>Capture screen. A PSD file will then appear on wherever you have set Layers to save it. You can also hit a keyboard shortcut to do this. You can also go to File>Capture front window to just capture the frontmost window (or again, there’s a keyboard shortcut).
But, this almost seems like a step back so far, because you can’t capture just any window or a selection without editing the PSD. Well, that’s not entirely true. If you go to Window>Inspector, you will see that you can capture individual elements very easily. If you click on one of the items in the list, Layers will highlight it and zoom in so you can see it. When you have a selection made (one or more items), you just hit Save, and Layers will save the/those elements. It also adds a white background to each element, which is nice if that’s what you want. If you don’t want that, all you have to do is click the Opaque toolbar item, and no white background will be drawn.
In the same inspector, you have a few more options. You can choose to hide all desktop elements and you can choose to hide all off-screen elements. Hiding the desktop is great if you need a screenshot with a blank desktop. You can also choose to give the selection a tight fit (which will make sure the total size of the PSD is the size of your desktop), a shadow, a frame and have the background opaque (these are all toolbar items).
wuonm’s Layers retails for $19.95 and you can download a free trial from their Web site. It adds a lot of functionality to screen-capturing, but it is not necessary for all people. Only those who need a PSD of their desktop, or need a shot of a few select elements will find use in this. For everyone else, Apple’s Grab is just fine.
This is really nice for those who create a lot of screenshots that need cropping or other tweaking after the fact. Putting each window/icon/ object on its own layer makes things a lot easier. If you create software training manuals, for example, I could see this being a huge plus!
That being said, this simply isn’t an app that 95% of Mac users will want to spend their money on. There are plenty of other screen capture apps that offer more useful features to the “average Joe” that this app lacks.
Why not just use shift-command-4 and save an arbitrary square zone of the screen as a png? Then import into whatever image program you like and convert to psd?
Well, the PSD would NOT be layered if you did that…