Whether you’re creating a tutorial or saving an online receipt, a screen grab can be worth a thousand words. Your Mac has long included versatile tools for this, but recent versions of macOS give them a serious boost. Here are all the ways to take advantage of these features, as well as some great apps that let you do even more.

To take a screenshot of your Mac’s entire screen and save it to the desktop, simply press Shift-Command-3. If you have multiple displays, you get a separate image for each display.

After taking any screenshot, click the thumbnail that appears in the bottom right corner of your screen to preview and edit the image: You can crop, rotate, annotate with text and arrows, and even add your signature. (Don’t like the result? Click the trash-can icon to delete the image immediately.)

When you’ve finished tweaking, click the share button or Done to save. You can also click the trash icon – no more having to find a screenshot on your desktop to delete it.

To grab just part of your screen, press Shift-Command-4, then drag the crosshair. Pro tip: Hold down the Space bar to freeze the size of the selection while moving it around, or hold Shift to lock the selection along one axis – vertical or horizontal – while you adjust the other.

Want to quickly grab an open window or menu? Press Shift-Command-4, then the Space bar. The crosshair will turn into a camera icon that you can use to select the item you want to capture. The window or menu doesn’t even have to be completely visible – macOS ignores everything in front of it!

Pro tip: When capturing a dialog, hold Command while you select the dialogue to isolate it from the window behind it.

If you’ll be pasting your screenshot into a document or email, add the Control key to the combinations above (for example, Control-Shift-Command-3, instead of Shift-Command-3). This copies the screenshot to the clipboard instead of saving it to the desktop.

Having trouble remembering all those shortcuts? Just remember one: Shift-Command-5. It brings up the macOS screenshot panel, which includes buttons for capturing the entire screen, a window or a section of the screen.

This panel also lets you take a screencast video of all or part of your screen, as well as a delayed screenshot – helpful if pressing a keyboard shortcut interrupts the action you’re trying to capture (for example, a pop-up menu that disappears whenever you press a key). You’ll find these features by clicking Options.

The Options menu also lets you change the location for saving screenshots, disable the preview/edit thumbnail, and more.

Want more options? These apps go beyond your Mac’s built-in screenshot features.

DeskMat saves you the hassle of cleaning up a messy desktop (no judgment!). Simply click its always-visible floating button, or press a keyboard shortcut, and DeskMat covers the desktop with your current desktop image or any other image you choose. You can also configure DeskMat to hide your desktop whenever a particular app – say, your screen-recording or presentation app – is running.

Desktop Curtain makes it easy to hide specific applications, or even particular windows within an app, when you take a screenshot. Just press a keyboard shortcut to “lower the curtain” at whatever depth you choose: behind desktop items, in front of desktop items, in front of desktop widgets or behind the active app’s windows. Or opt for the background to act like a standard window, so you can position it at exactly the level you want relative to other windows.

The nifty utility ScreenToLayers has the super-useful ability to take layered screenshots: It saves windows, dialog boxes, menus and other items on your screen as separate layers, each of which can be repositioned, reordered, edited and deleted in your favourite image editor. Don’t have a full-featured image editor yet? Acorn (shown below) fits the bill and includes its own layered-screenshot feature – no separate app required.

HazeOver dims all but the top window to help you focus while working. Use it for a professional look when making screen captures and recordings.

Want to capture a frame of a video at full resolution? Open any QuickTime-supported video file – or a YouTube URL – inSnapMotion, scrub to the desired frame and click the Capture button. You can even rotate and flip your video before capturing, or batch-capture a series of frames.

ScreenFloat keeps your latest screenshot floating onscreen, with or without transparency – perfect when you need to reference something in the screenshot while working in another app. You can also edit and annotate screenshots; detect or redact text, barcodes and faces; and save screenshots to the Shots Browser to archive and organise them.

Need to present a full-screen screenshot in the device it was captured on? Simply drag the image into Framous’s window. The app automatically determines the source device and precisely places the screenshot in that device frame. Framous can also combine multiple in-device screenshots into a single, perfectly spaced image.

macOS saves screenshots in PNG format at full size, but you may need to use other formats or sizes for your projects. GraphicConverter can resize, compress and convert screenshots to dozens of formats. And its batch-conversion features let you make the same tweaks to dozens or hundreds of screenshots at once.

TextSniper is the easiest way to copy uncopyable text, whether it’s in photos, screenshots, PDFs, videos, online presentations or apps. Simply press Shift-Command-2, then select the area of the screen with the text you want to copy – the text is added to your Clipboard, ready for pasting.