How to remove the grey space on either side of a screenshot in Monterey?

1. Press the Command (⌘)-Shift (⇧)-4 keys simultaneously on your Mac’s keyboard. You’ll enter a mode where you can take a screenshot of a selected area of your screen and your mouse pointer should change to a crosshair icon.
2. Press the Spacebar key. This will change your cursor to a camera symbol to denote that you’ll be capturing a screenshot of a specific window.
3. Now hold the Option (⌥) key, position the cursor over a window you’d like to screenshot, then hit the left mouse button to grab an image of the selected window without the annoying drop shadow effect.

The old method to globally disable drop shadow screenshot effect no longer works on Monterey:

 defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow true; killall SystemUIServer

If you are capturing a selected area that includes the edge of a window you will pickup a drop shadow in the screenshot. If you are capturing a selected window and use the Option key you will not pickup a drop shadow.

At this time, there is no automatic way to avoid the drop shadow on a selected area capture. However, you can work around it with some extra work on your part. Using a multi-step process, you can capture the window then capture the background and you can layer the two images in an image editor then merge the layers and have a the result you are looking for. Preview should suffice but other image / photo editors will have more features and options.

Alternative: Capture the entire window open in Preview and crop it.

The drop shadow only applies to window screenshots as macOS renders a drop shadow. If you capture a portion of a window you shouldn't see the drop shadow. But if for some reason you do try the same process without hitting the space bar to switch to window capture mode. Still use the Option key.

VikingOSX wrote:

Use shift+command+5, select the Window capture icon, and press the option key while clicking the selected window. This captures the window without any shadow. Tested: macOS 12.2.1.

Indeed. We may have to switch names. 🧠

Use shift+command+5, select the Window capture icon, and press the option key while clicking the selected window. This captures the window without any shadow. Tested: macOS 12.2.1.

Using both hemispheres concurrently. What a trip that would be… 🧠🧠

😎