Screen Sculpt
A screenshot tool for people who need the pixels to be right. Scrolling capture, on-image measurement, colour and contrast, and text recognition — native, free, and nothing leaves your Mac.
Version 0.1.2 · macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Apple silicon and Intel
What it does
Four things properly, not forty vaguely
Scrolling capture
Capture a page taller than the screen. Screen Sculpt scrolls the window a little at a time and joins the frames, detecting fixed headers and footers so they are not repeated down the result. If you would rather not grant it permission to scroll, do the scrolling yourself and it will watch.
Measurement that stays in the image
Drag a ruler between two elements and the distance is written into the screenshot, in pixels and in points. A live readout follows your cursor while you select, so you know the size before you crop.
Colour and contrast
Read the colour under the pointer or the average across a selection, in HEX, RGB, HSL or OKLCh. Check any two colours against WCAG 2 and APCA contrast thresholds without leaving the screenshot.
Text recognition
Pull text out of anything on screen — an error dialog, a video, a PDF that will not let you select. The text lands on your clipboard immediately and opens in a window so you can check it, fix a misread character and copy it again. QR codes and barcodes are read too.
Sixteen annotation tools
Arrow, line, rectangle, oval, text, freehand, highlighter, numbered counter, blur, spotlight, magnifier, ruler, placed image, backdrop and appended captures. Everything stays editable until you flatten it.
Built for pixel work
Zoom from 5% to 3200% with a pixel grid that fades in as you go, nearest-neighbour sampling so a pixel is a square rather than a smudge, and full undo across every edit.
Getting started
How to use it
Screen Sculpt lives in the menu bar. There is no Dock icon until you have a screenshot open, and no window until you take one.
1 · Take a capture
Press ⇧⌘2 and drag over the area you want — the size in pixels and points follows your cursor as you drag. Or use the menu bar icon and pick a capture mode. The first time you capture, macOS will ask for Screen Recording permission.
2 · Capture a long page
Press ⌃⇧⌘2 and choose how the page should scroll. Let Screen Sculpt scroll needs Accessibility permission and does the work for you. I'll scroll it myself needs no permission at all — you scroll, it watches and joins the frames, then you click Done. Pick that one for pages that load as you scroll.
3 · Mark it up
The editor opens on the display the capture came from. Press a single letter to choose a tool, then drag. Everything you add stays editable and can be undone; ⌘E flattens it into the image when you are finished.
4 · Hide what should not be shared
Press B and drag over anything private. Four modes: pixelate, blur, solid block, and one that finds and covers only the text. Prefer pixelate or solid for real secrets — a small-radius blur is partly reversible, and the app tells you which mode is which.
5 · Measure and check colour
Press U and drag between two elements to write the distance into the image. Move the pointer over the screenshot to read the colour beneath it, and add a second colour to see the WCAG and APCA contrast between them.
6 · Get the text out
Press ⇧⌘O and drag over any text on screen. It is copied straight to your clipboard and shown in a window where you can read it, correct it and copy again. Wrapped lines can be rejoined with one click.
Shortcuts
Keyboard
| ⇧⌘1 | Capture the whole screen |
| ⇧⌘2 | Capture an area |
| ⌃⇧⌘2 | Capture a scrolling page |
| ⌃⇧⌘5 | Capture the active window |
| ⇧⌘O | Recognise text on screen |
All of these can be changed in Settings → Shortcuts.
While a screenshot is open
| ⌘W | Close the screenshot |
| ⌘Q | Also closes the screenshot, rather than quitting |
⌘Q does not quit. Screen Sculpt is the menu bar icon and the capture shortcuts, not the window — so closing a screenshot with the key you would normally reach for should not also switch off the shortcuts you use it with. It closes the screenshot and the app stays where it is. To quit properly, click the menu bar icon and choose Quit Screen Sculpt.
Installing
Getting it onto your Mac
Screen Sculpt is not signed with a paid Apple certificate, so macOS will warn you the first time. That is worth explaining honestly rather than hiding, because the warning it shows is misleading.
1 · Download and open the disk image
Double-click the downloaded .dmg, then drag
Screen Sculpt into your Applications folder.
2 · If macOS says the app is damaged
It is not damaged. macOS shows that message for any app downloaded from the web that is not signed with a $99-a-year Apple certificate. To open it:
- Open System Settings → Privacy & Security
- Scroll to the bottom — there will be a line about Screen Sculpt
- Click Open Anyway and authenticate
On macOS 15 and later, Control-clicking the app no longer works for this. It has to be done from System Settings.
3 · Skip the warning entirely
The warning comes from a flag your browser attaches to the download,
not from the app. Downloading with curl does not attach
it, so this installs with no dialog at all:
curl -fsSL https://apps.lipu.bd/downloads/ScreenSculpt-0.1.2.dmg -o /tmp/ss.dmg \
&& hdiutil attach -nobrowse -quiet /tmp/ss.dmg \
&& cp -R /Volumes/ScreenSculpt/ScreenSculpt.app /Applications/ \
&& hdiutil detach -quiet /Volumes/ScreenSculpt \
&& open /Applications/ScreenSculpt.app4 · Grant Screen Recording
A screenshot tool cannot work without it. macOS will ask the first time you capture. If you have more than one copy of the app on your Mac, keep only the one in Applications — macOS grants permission to a particular copy, and the list shows them all under the same name.
Verify what you downloaded. Because there is no Apple
notarisation ticket, this checksum is the only way to confirm the file
is the one published here. Run
shasum -a 256 ScreenSculpt-0.1.2.dmg and compare:
28872747f7ee49a69a73a352e503241caee8745a13c0182bcc24cded54faf23e
Screen Sculpt 0.1.2
macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Apple silicon and Intel · Released 27 September 2026
Free and open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. No account, no telemetry, no uploads — every capture stays on your Mac.