The bottom section of the Inspector window provides a list of every onscreen element Layers can capture. By default, none are selected, meaning Layers will capture everything. But if you click on an item to select it--or command+click to select multiple items--you can choose to have Layers capture only those items. In other words, without having to move a single window, you can omit particular windows, icons, or even menu-bar icons from your screenshots. The List Mode button in the toolbar toggles the display between a flat list and a hierarchical listing; the latter is similar to the Finder's list view, with items grouped by type: applications, the Desktop, menus, and so on. The preview area, just above the list, shows you what the resulting screenshot will look like.

(Unfortunately, the Select All command, found in almost every Mac program that allows you to select items, is missing in action. This means that if you want to exclude just a few items from your screenshot, you can't highlight everything and then manually de-select those few; instead, you have to painstakingly command+click on every item you want to include.)

At the top of the Inspector are buttons to hide or show the Desktop and to choose which displays to include if you have more than one. There are also buttons--Tight Fit, Shadow, Framing, and Opaque, for tweaking the resulting image. You can get more details about these settings, including comparative examples, at ; tight fit, for example, will crop the resulting screenshot so it's just large enough to contain the selected items.

Finally, almost hidden at the bottom of the Inspector window is a tiny pop-up menu that offers two useful alternatives to saving your screenshot as a Photoshop file: Composite Image, which saves in PNG format, useful--and smaller--if you don't need to work with individual elements or if you're passing the image on to someone who may not have Photoshop; and Bunch Of Images, which saves each selected item as a separate PNG image file, with these images grouped together in a common folder. The latter option works well with one exception: I found that if I didn't select any items in the list, which should have resulted in all items being captured, I instead got a seemingly random subset--a very small subset at that. However, if I actively selected items, the feature worked as advertised.

As an example of the Inspector feature in action, the left-hand side of the image below is a standard capture of my Mac's screen--actually made up of two displays--with approximately 20 programs running. The right-hand side is the same two-display setup captured just seconds later with Layers. I used the Inspector to include only the left-hand display, and then selected only the Desktop, the menu bar, and a single program window. (I resized the two images to fit here, so they're not scaled equally.) Taking the same shot using OS X's built-in functionality, or even , would have required a good deal of moving of windows and switching around of programs, even with the help of a utility such as .