A cross-hair cursor will appear and you can click and drag to select the area you wish to capture. The screen shot will be placed on your clipboard for you to paste into another program like PowerPoint, Word, Photoshop, etc. The screen shot will be automatically saved as a PNG file on your desktop with the filename starting with “Picture” followed by a number, example Picture 1, Picture 2, and so on.
Here's a summary of all the keyboard shortcuts you can use to capture your screen in Mac OS X. A screen shot is an image of your computer desktop or an active window. The Macintosh operating system has always made it easy to capture a screen shot.