Today's tip comes from Greg Neagle, Senior Systems Engineer at Walt Disney Animation Studios. While at MacTech, I caught up with him and asked for a nifty tip. He said, "I'd go with pasting a screenshot directly to the clipboard." Having never heard of this, I asked him to explain, so here is Greg's tip along with a bonus from me in case you didn't know it either:
If you use the keyboard commands for screenshots, the defaults are Command-Shift-3 for a full desktop screenshot, and Command-Shift-4 gives you the crosshairs to allow you to select the area you want to capture. If you add Control to those combinations, instead of getting a screenshot on your desktop, it just gets copied to the clipboard, and you can paste it wherever you need to use it: documentation, email, wherever you need to drop in a screenshot, this saves you having to copy it first, since it's already copied!
Screenshot crosshairs for selecting an area to capture.
My bonus tip is this: If you use Command-Shift-4 and get the crosshairs, press the spacebar to grab a shot of the active window. Your cursor changes to a camera, and the window it's targeting will be highlighted (generally blue or purple, based on your System Preferences) so it's clear what you're about to capture. Just move your camera-cursor to highlight the window you want, then click your mouse or trackpad to snap the shot.
Screenshot, now with camera icon and purple highlight of the active window.