Tips: Refine

This section includes tips and tricks for annotation, image manipulation, image state control and smart features.

Regular tools

• Keep marks readable. Add an Outline colour so arrows and text stay visible over both light and dark screenshots. It has its own width control, so a thin casing on a busy screenshot is possible.
• Two kinds of arrow. Line Arrow is straight, Free Arrow follows your hand — and both take adjustable end-caps plus solid, dashed, or dotted styling.
• Style text. The text tool carries a full font picker, a weight slider, color and size, and various other controls.
• Numbered badges. Click in the order you want people to read; the numbers auto-increment.

Shadows and layers

• Drop shadows with a position pad. Toggle a shadow on, then aim it with the pad or one of eight direction presets — the cheapest way to lift a mark off a cluttered background.
• Annotations are layers. Send them forward or backward from the properties panel when a label ends up under an arrow.

Zoom and pan

• ⌘-scroll to zoom at the cursor. Works from any tool — point at the detail and the zoom lands there, no trip to the zoom control.
• ⌘+ / ⌘− / ⌘0. Zoom in, zoom out, and back to actual size (100%) from the keyboard.
• Right-drag to pan. Hold the right button and drag to move around a zoomed image — a plain right-click still opens the context menu. The Hand tool pans too.
• Focus on part of the image. Drag the focus brackets to mark the area you care about, and the Focus button zooms straight to it.
• Crop to the focus area — or clear it. The right-click menu has Crop to Focus Area and Reset Focus Area. Both are available once the focus brackets mark something smaller than the whole image.

Image state

• Undo and redo. ⌘Z and ⌘⇧Z can undo and redo actions quickly.
• Duplicate an item. Right-click an image or video and select Duplicate. The duplicate keeps the annotations you’ve added.
• Revert to Original Image. In the right-click menu — takes the capture back to its original pixels in one step.
• Enhance Clarity and Remove Background. Sharpen a low-resolution grab, or lift a subject off its background — both under Enhance Clarity and Remove Background.
• Insert images. Drop a logo, a callout, or a second screenshot onto the canvas rather than compositing somewhere else.
• Crop stays adjustable. Crop and resize is an annotation like any other, so trimming early doesn’t cost you the pixels.

Smart features

• Title and summary. When on-device AI is on, every capture auto-generates a title, summary, and Smart Keywords. You can edit the summary as you like.
• Extract data from an image. Extract Data pulls text data out and organizes it under different types.
• Select text straight off the image. OCR Live Text recognizes and highlights text in the image, so you can select and copy it directly.
• Scan for sensitive information automatically. Turn on auto-scan in Settings → On-Device AI and every capture is checked the moment it opens.
• Solid fill. Use solid fill for secrets, which is unrecoverable in the export.