How to Screenshot a Single Window on Mac

Cropping a full-screen screenshot down to one window is the slow way. macOS captures any single window perfectly — exact pixel edges, rounded corners preserved, background excluded — with one shortcut and one keystroke: Cmd + Shift + 4, then Space. Same on macOS 13, 14, and 15.

The two-keystroke window capture

1. Press Cmd + Shift + 4. The pointer becomes a crosshair.
2. Tap Space. The crosshair becomes a camera, and whatever window you hover over highlights blue.
3. Click the window you want. It saves like any screenshot — to the Desktop by default.

The capture is the window alone: perfectly cropped, corners intact, with everything behind it excluded and replaced by transparency. The window doesn't need to be in front — hovering brings any visible window into reach, so you can screenshot a background window without clicking into it first. Press Esc at any point to cancel, and tap Space again if you'd rather go back to the drag-selection crosshair.

The shadow — keep it or drop it

By default, macOS includes the window's drop shadow, rendered onto a transparent margin around the window. It looks great on white documentation pages; it adds unwanted padding everywhere else.

To capture without it: hold Option while you click the window. The file then contains exactly the window's pixels — no shadow, no transparent border. If you always want shadowless captures, there's a real preference for it:

# always capture windows without the shadow
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true
# undo: restore the default shadow
defaults delete com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow

The change applies from your next capture (log out and back in if it doesn't take effect immediately). With the preference set, Option-clicking inverts it — adding the shadow back for one shot.

It works on more than windows

Window-capture mode treats many interface elements as windows. Hover the camera over each and it highlights:

• Open menus — drop a menu down first, then Cmd + Shift + 4, Space, click the menu. You get just the menu, cleanly cropped.
• The Dock — captures the whole Dock as one strip.
• The menu bar — the full bar, icons and clock included.
• Dialogs, sheets, and notification banners — each captures as its own object.

That makes this the cleanest way to document interface pieces — no cropping session in Preview afterwards.

Sizing and sharpness for documentation

Two practical notes if the capture is headed for docs or a design review. First, the file's pixel dimensions: on a Retina display, captures are taken at native resolution, so a window that looks 800 points wide on screen produces a 1600-pixel-wide image — crisp when scaled down, and the reason Mac screenshots look so sharp in documentation. Second, consistency: if you're capturing the same window repeatedly across a guide, size it once and leave it alone — macOS remembers window sizes per app, so every capture in the series comes out identical. Repeating a capture is cheap: the window doesn't move, and the whole sequence is four keystrokes and a click.

The toolbar route

The same capture lives in the screenshot toolbar: press Cmd + Shift + 5, choose Capture Selected Window, then click a window. It behaves identically, and the toolbar adds the extras — a timer under Options (useful when the window state you want disappears on keypress) and your choice of save destination, including straight to the clipboard. For clipboard-in-one-shortcut, add Ctrl to the whole sequence: Ctrl + Cmd + Shift + 4, Space, click — the window lands on the clipboard, ready to paste.