How to make screenshots look good for X, LinkedIn and slides

A good-looking screenshot is the raw capture plus four things: a background behind it, padding around it, a soft shadow under it, and rounded corners, exported at the aspect ratio of wherever it’s going (16:9 for an X post or a slide, 1.91:1, square or 4:5 for LinkedIn). Neither macOS nor Windows does this for you. The closest built-in is the Mac’s window capture (⌘⇧4, then Space, then click a window), which keeps the window’s rounded corners and drop shadow on a transparent background. Everything past that means a trip through Keynote, PowerPoint, Figma or Canva, or a screenshot tool with a background editor, like hypershot’s artboard.

The built-in way

On a Mac, start with a window capture rather than a region:

1. Press ⌘⇧4, then Space. The pointer becomes a camera.
2. Click the window. You get the window with its own rounded corners and the macOS drop shadow, on transparency. (Hold ⌥ while you click if you ever want it without the shadow.)

That already looks decent pasted onto a white slide. To go further, place it on a slide in Keynote or a frame in Figma or Canva, fill the slide or frame with a color, leave a margin, add a shadow from the image’s style options, and export at the size you need.

On Windows, Snipping Tool (Win+Shift+S) captures cleanly, but its editor has no background, padding or shadow options. The usual route is PowerPoint: a 16:9 slide with a colored background, the screenshot in the middle, a shadow from Picture Format, then export the slide as an image.

Both routes work, and design tools give you complete control. The cost is time: five minutes per image, a second file to keep if you ever need to redo it, and doing it all again when the screenshot changes.

With hypershot

The artboard is the frame around every capture, and it carries all four ingredients.

1. Capture the thing: ⌘⇧W on macOS or Ctrl+Shift+W on Windows for a whole window, ⌘⇧2 on macOS or Ctrl+Shift+3 on Windows for part of the screen.
2. Open it in the editor and press B for the Artboard tool.
3. Under Background, pick Solid, Gradient or Image. The gradient popover has twelve presets; Capture pulls its colors from your screenshot, so the background matches whatever you shot. Image can use a blurred copy of the capture itself.
4. A background starts with 75 px of padding on every side. Drag the outer handles to change it.
5. The shadow controls appear once a background is on: opacity, blur, and an angle dial for direction and distance.
6. Round the corners with the corner radius handles. The screenshot and the background round independently; hold Shift to link them.
7. Optional: Chrome adds a macOS or Windows title bar, useful when your capture is a region and you want it to read as a window.
8. Type the exact export size in Size, and click the lock to hold the aspect ratio.

Then copy it, drag it out, or save it. The capture stays an editable .hypercapture file, so changing the gradient next week is a click, not a rebuild.

Sizes for each platform

Platforms crop and recompress images that don’t fit their feed, so size for the destination:

Feed specs shift now and then. If a platform starts cropping your images, check its current recommendation. With a background on, hypershot’s size inputs set the whole image, background included, up to 8192 px per side.

Tips

• Crop first, then pad. A tight crop on the part that matters, with generous padding, reads better than a full window shrunk to fit.
• Keep the background quieter than the screenshot. The Capture preset or a blurred copy of the image keeps the colors in the same family.
• Label it if it needs explaining. Arrows, text and numbered steps sit on top of the artboard, so the polish and the markup live in one file.

Can I reuse the same look on every screenshot?

For a consistent series, pick one gradient preset and one padding and use them every time. Capture gives each image its own matching colors, while a fixed preset like Midnight or Mono makes a set look like a set.