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I've found the default 40px Mac OS X window shadow too big:

mac os x shadow

Is it possible to decrease it to, say, 4px?

Update: I can disable shadows entirely with defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true, but I don't want to. I do want decrease them.

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com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow applies to just single-window screenshots, like screencapture -o. Related to osx - Disable drop shadows around windows or the menu bar on OS X - Super User. – Lauri Ranta Aug 8 '11 at 9:25
I had a big shadow like this in my application, and just had to drop it down to around 4px. It was an obvious issue for me, hopefully Apple fixes this in the future. – Devin G Rhode May 5 '12 at 5:35

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

According to this post on AppleInsider, WindowShade X has the ability to manipulate window shadows. However I don't see it mentioned in WindowShade X's documentation anywhere...

Ever tried WindowShade X?

The Shadows tab (er, button) gives you very fine-grained contol over window shadow appearance.

EDIT: There's also Shadow Killer X (still working on OSX 10.7 Lion)

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Shadow Killer X is old, and won't work on Leopard, which means it won't work on Snow Leopard either. Second, the OP first ask about changing shadows on the screen, then brought up killing screen capture shadows. Which is it, that you want? – user43950 Jul 25 '10 at 21:10
up vote 1 down vote

On dual screens this shadow is annoying.

http://www.blacktree.com/projects/nocturne.html has a Night/Day modus, the night modus removes the shadow. If you disable the rest of the night modus settings it has the effect I wanted.

Would like a little Apple preference setting somewhere though.

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up vote 0 down vote

Only the frontmost window has this huge shadow, it's smaller for background windows. So you can try screenshotting non-focused windows (easy if you activate e.g. Mail and close all its windows, so no window has focus). However you would have to live with the deactivated, washed out look or manually merge both deactivated and active window screenshots.

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