Capture

Screenshots you can still edit next week.

An annotated screenshot is normally a dead end: the arrow is in the pixels, so moving it means starting again. Lumae keeps the capture and the marks apart, so a screenshot reopens as a document rather than a picture.

Shortcuts: ⌥⌘3 display, ⌥⌘4 area or window
Copy directly: add ⌃ to either
Marks: arrow, box, ellipse, highlight, blur, text, step
Default mark: 4 pt line, 20 pt text
Mosaic block: 1/60 of the shorter side, min 8 px
Export: PNG, 144 DPI for a 2× capture

Capture from anywhere

⌥⌘3 captures a display and ⌥⌘4 an area or a window, from any app. The same actions sit in the File menu and the menu bar item. Add ⌃ to either shortcut to put the picture straight on the clipboard, with a small notice on the display where it was taken; it is still saved to the library so you can annotate it later.

The picture is a frame of a short capture stream at the display's own pixel density, with no cursor and no window shadow, taken while every Lumae window is excluded, so the app is never in its own screenshot.

Eight marks, all editable

Arrow, rectangle, ellipse, highlight, mosaic blur, text, numbered step and crop. Each is two anchor points plus a style, which is why they all move and resize identically: an arrow's tail and head, a box's two corners in any order, a badge's centre.

Nothing is painted onto the pixels. The file that is kept is the original capture plus a small description of the marks, so months later you can move an arrow, change a colour, renumber the steps, or crop differently, and export a fresh PNG.

Blur that does not leak

The mosaic is computed once from the whole picture, in blocks of a sixtieth of its shorter side, and then clipped to the box you drew. A mosaic computed per box would shift its blocks as you dragged it and average in pixels from just outside its edge, which is a quiet way of leaking exactly what you were trying to hide.

It is also the one mark clipped to the picture's own outline, so a corner the picture lost to its radius does not fill with blocks.

The same frame a recording gets

Backgrounds, padding, corner radius and shadow are the video's, reached through the same code, so a screenshot and a still from a recording can be framed to match. A screenshot starts plain, with the capture exactly as taken; choosing a background gives it the framed defaults.

Marks may sit out in the padding, so an arrow or a caption can point at the picture from outside it. Export a PNG at the capture's own pixel density, with the DPI written in so other apps know its point size, or copy it straight to the clipboard.

Questions

Are the annotations permanent?

No. A screenshot is stored as a .lumaeshot package holding the original picture and a description of the marks. Reopen it any time and every mark is still a separate, editable object.

Can I crop and still get the full picture back?

Yes. A crop only chooses what the flattened image shows; it never discards pixels or moves your marks. Reset Crop returns the whole capture.

Does it replace the macOS screenshot tool?

It sits beside it. The capture flow deliberately mirrors ⇧⌘3 and ⇧⌘4, and Lumae adds the editable annotation layer, the frame and the library on top.

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