Decrease the size of shadows when doing a screen capture in OS X Lion?

Question

When taking a screenshot in Mac OS X Lion, I've noticed the shadows appear to be a lot larger than in Snow Leopard. Perhaps they just fade more gradually and this takes up more space. Whatever the case it is a bit annoying.

I've found a bit of code (below) that allows one to disable shadows from being captured in OS X Lion's screenshots by default:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

killall SystemUIServer

But I sort of like the shadows, just not "that much" of them. Is there a way to decrease the shadows without turning them off completely?

Example of the calculator window with huge shadows in Lion (red is edge of screenshot):

Compare to Snow Leopard:

Answer 1

Take the screenshots while the window is not the focused window. Calculator on OS X Lion:

If you don't like the look, you can always take two screenshots:

• one screenshot with unfocused window and shadow
• one screenshot focused without shadow

Then merge them. It takes a basic image editor with layers and is really easy to do, you just need to move the shadowless layer a bit below center, since the bottom shadow is bigger than the top shadow. Here's the shadowless image I used:

Here's the final result after less than a minute in Pixelmator: