How To Highlight Text In Mac Screenshots

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to highlight text in a screenshot on your Mac.

Now the built-in Screenshot Tool on your Mac can do a ton of different things. There's lots of deep functionality there. But there's one thing it doesn't do very well that users often to do, which is to highlight text in a screenshot. So, for instance, let's say you're looking at this webpage and you want to take a screenshot of what's there and then highlight some text in it. 

So I'm going to invoke the Screenshot Tool with Shift Command 5. That brings up the Screenshot Tool here. You can capture the entire screen, a window, or I'm going to capture just the selected portion. For my options I'm going to have it saved to the Desktop but you can have it saved elsewhere. I'm going to have it set to Show Floating Thumbnail so I have a chance to highlight text before it is saved. Then I'm going to Remember Last Selection so that I don't have to keep selecting the same portion of text as I show you the options here. 

Now I'm going to select the area, like this, and I'm going to click the Capture Button there. The Floating Thumbnail appears below me. I'll click that to bring that up. Now I can see the text there that I have taken a screenshot of. Now the goal is to highlight some text. You don't do anything else but simply try to select some text. You notice that you can. As a matter of fact you kind of get the result you want right away. But you're not actually highlighting text here. You're selecting text. This is actually an image here. It's black pixels on a white background. It's not real text. But the Screenshot Tool will interpret the pixels, figure out what words were there, and allow you to select those words. This is known as Live Text. If in fact at this point I do Command C to copy and then switch to an app, like Text Edit, and paste, you could see it changed the pixels to text when I copied and I was able to paste it here. So that's the Live Text functionality.  

But unfortunately if you just stop right here and click Done you'll find the screenshot saved, but if you look at it you'll see the selection isn't there. It was just a temporary selection, you weren't really changing the screenshot at all. So let's try it again and I'm going to capture the same area here and click on the Floating Thumbnail. Now the goal is to actually highlight it so that when you save the screenshot you see the highlighted text. So making any changes to the screenshot here before it is saved involves the Markup Tools. 

The Markup Tools are accessed with this little button here. It looks like the tip of a pencil. Click that and now you get all these Markup Tools. Sure enough one of them, right here, is Highlight Selection, which seems to be exactly what we want. Except it doesn't work at all. It just simply doesn't work. The tool is here because it is part of the Markup Tools but it doesn't work in this situation because there is actually no text here. If I were to zoom in on this, for instance, you can see the pixels. So this is an image. A screenshot of what's there. Not text. So the highlight selection tool doesn't work at all. It's a shame it is still there. It should be removed or Apple can figure out a way to make it work. But it is there and it just doesn't do anything. So let's skip over that and find a real way to make it work. It's not going to be a simple one-step thing but it can be done. 

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So the way most people make this work is simply to draw rectangles over text. But first you want to prepare. You have two color settings here. You've got the Line or Border color and you've got the Fill Color. So when you draw a shape, like a rectangle, it will use these. You want to make sure the border color is set to Nothing. This little white square with the red line through it. Then you want to make sure that the Fill color is set to the color that you want to use for highlight. I'm going to choose yellow here. But after you choose yellow you want to go into the tool again and click Show Colors. That brings up the Color Picker. No matter which mode you have the Color Picker in, go to the Wheel Mode here and you'll find Opacity. Set that to something less than 100. Like 50% or you may even want to go lower. So now you don't just have yellow, you've got 50% yellow. Now we're ready to draw a rectangle. 

To draw a rectangle click on the Shape Tools here and then click the Rectangle. We'll place the rectangle here. You can click in the middle to drag it around. You can see it acts like a highlight. Any of these blue dots can be dragged to change this shape. So we can change the shape here to this and make a highlight. Now when we click Done and it Saves, we could see that the highlight is saved as part of the screenshot. These are actually pixels here. So you've got yellow pixels covering the black pixels of the words. 

But what if it's not as simple as that? What if you want to highlight a little bit more than just a single line like that. Well, you can draw multiple rectangles. So I've got my border and Fill color set there already. I can just add a new rectangle and I could set it to cover the area I want. Now, if I want to cover another area I can click here and add another rectangle. Or I can select this rectangle here. It's kind of hard to do. You have to move your pointer over it. When you see the Hand pointer there click it and you can now select this and move it around, resize it, and all of that. But you can also, when you see the Hand there, you can hold the Option Key down and drag and it makes a duplicate of it. It sometimes works better if you zoom in a bit. So this is a larger area and it's easier to go and select another portion, like this. So you can continue to add more rectangles, as many as you want, to highlight as much text as you want here and then when you click Done or you Share it in any way here it will include those highlights as yellow pixels. If you ever want to change the color you simply can be going in here. Let's pick this color here and I need to go into Show Colors again and change the Opacity to 50% or something else and then I'll add another rectangle there and you can see how I can have a variety of different colors. Really any color I want as highlights.

There are other variations as well. There are tons of different ways to be able to highlight text. For instance I could use a border color . Let's use red here. Let's set the Fill to Nothing and then I can use a rectangle like this and I can outline an area, like that. I could go to this tool here and change the thickness of the line very easily. I could also use Arrows, like this, let's make this one thicker, like that and I can point to various things. I could also use other shapes, like ovals or rounded rectangles or these little speech bubbles. I can also use this tool here which basically grays out most of the document outside of a single rectangle. I can position this rectangle wherever I want. So this really helps you highlight a single rectangle in the Screenshot. You can't add multiple ones of these. It's just one so it has limited use if you have more areas you want to highlight. 

But you can go and use the Loop Tool and this will allow you to place a circle around something and make it a little bit bigger, magnify it a different way, and you can have multiple ones of these. Not really useful for text since it is always a circle but it is useful for pointing out things in images or a user interface in a screenshot. 

You could also just decide that you want to have a line color that is semi-transparent, like this. You are going to want to make the line as thick as possible and then you can use a Line like this and then place the line over text, if you want, or you can use either the Sketch or Draw Tool here. I'll use Sketch right there and I can draw, like that, and it will draw various lines wherever I want them to make it easy to highlight things. You can also use the regular Draw Tool here. But that draws a thinner line so it's a little harder to work with. 

But here's a very different way to go about doing it in situations like this when it's actually a document. It could be a document in a word processing app or a webpage like this. But if it is something that you can print out as a PDF then you could actually use the PDF version to highlight things. So, for instance, for this webpage here I'm going to go to File and then Print, or just Command P. From here you have a ton of options, like just click the PDF button there or you can Save as a PDF and just save it out to the Desktop like this. Then I'll open it up in Preview. But you could just go right to Preview with that Menu there. Now PDF is fundamentally different from a screenshot. Remember the screenshot is pixels. So if you Zoom in you can see the individual pixels. But, a PDF is actually the text inside of a document. So if you zoom in here you can see nice smooth text. The text is actually part of the document and rendered when you're viewing it. So it knows exactly what letters and words and sentences are here in this document and you can select them. So you can select text, like in the screenshot, and copy it and all. But you're selecting real text, not pixels. If you look at the Markup Tools up here you'll notice there's this Pencil that's actually a regular button in the Toolbar, not even part of the Markup Tools. It will allow you to highlight the selection.

I can click it here and you could see it highlights that text. I can very easily highlight any text that I want. Not only that I can click here, change the highlight color. There are five selections. Or use Underline or Strikethrough. So I can highlight other text like this. As a matter of fact with this tool selected I can just select text and continue to highlight things very easily. Now a problem here is that this PDF is huge. It's all sixteen pages of this web document. But it doesn't need to be. I can use the Thumbnails here and if you don't see the Thumbnails here click on this button and select Thumbnails there or View Thumbnails. I'm going to select the second page, go all the way down and Shift Click to select the sixteenth page and then simply hit Delete. That will delete all those pages. Then from here I'm going to click the Selection Tool and I'm going to select the area I want to keep, like this. Then I'm just going to go to Tools, Crop or Command K and it crops it to just that section. Now I can just Save with quick Command S. You can see here I've got a PDF that has all my highlights in it. Not only that it is real text. I can zoom in and see the letters up close. It's nice and smooth and ready for viewing at any resolution or printing. 

So as you can see while the Screenshot Tool doesn't have a straight forward quick and easy highlight text function you can do it many different ways. If it is a document or webpage you're looking at you can easily create a PDF and then highlight text in the PDF. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.