I need to take a bunch of screenshots for my documentation so I looked for a Mac OS X utility to save the screenshots directly as GIF or JPEG files.

Grab and Cmd-Shift-4 are great for saving screenshots as PDF files, but then you have to open and export each shot.I tried FreeSnap, but though it had the functionality I wanted, the compression on the JPEGs was a little too rough for my tastes.

Change of strategy – instead of outputting directly to file, I decided I wanted a way to copy the screen area straight to the clipboard so I can paste it into Photoshop. A quick search returned this article with an explanation of how to use the command line ‘screencapture’. This looks like it will do the trick.