How do I change the format of a Mac screen capture?

It's not hard to change the format of a screen capture / screenshot made with the native Mac OS X capture utility, but you do have to be comfortable opening up your Terminal.app and typing in a command on the command line. Y'know, the Unix underneath the snazzy graphical interface. :-)

Start by going to Applications --> Utilities --> Terminal.app and launching it. You'll see something like this:

At this point you want to decide which format you'd like. Here are your choices:

• BMP (Windows bitmap)
• GIF
• JPEG 2000 (what you chose)
• JPEG
• PDF
• PICT
• PNG
• PSD
• SGI
• TGA
• TIFF

Pick the one you like -- I recommend PNG, which stands for progressive network graphic, as the best of both GIF and JPEG formats -- and then type in the following command exactly as shown:

For example, if you did decide to use PNG format, you'd type:

Type that in and you won't see anything change, but next time you take a screen shot (as documented here: how to get a screen capture on Mac OS X) you'll have the image saved in the format you seek.