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I take a lot of screenshots writing for Macworld and this blog. Most of the time I use Tiger’s built-in keyboard shortcuts, saving the pictures to the desktop. Then I open them in Photoshop, edit them, save them for the web, and delete the original. But poking around the Grab Help file, I noticed a way to save screen grabs to the Clipboard, saving the hassle of deleting the files after editing. Here’s how:

First, if you aren’t already aware of the keyboard shortcuts for taking a picture of the screen in OS X, here they are:

1. Command-Shift-3 takes a picture of the entire screen and saves it to the desktop.
2. Press Command-Shift-4 to capture a selection of the screen. The cursor will change to a cross-hair. Hold the mouse button down and drag to create your selection. When you release the mouse, the selection is captured to the desktop.
3. To select an area of the screen (a window, the menu bar, the dock, etc.), press Command-Shift-4, then press the Space bar. The cursor changes to a camera; as you move the camera over different areas, they will be highlighted. Note that the area to capture doesn’t need to be on the top layer, that is, you can capture a window that is covered by other windows as long as you can move the camera over some part of it to highlight it. To cancel the camera and drag to make a selection, press the Spacebar again. To cancel, press the Space bar (so the cross-hair is showing, not the camera), then press the Escape key.

Finally, to capture a screenshot to the Clipboard, hold down the Control key when you press the other shortcut keys. You can then paste the image directly into another application. For example, if you open Photoshop and create a new file after capturing a screenshot to the Clipboard, the new document will default to the size of the captured image. Create the new document, paste the image from the Clipboard, and you’re good to go.