Tom Rogers

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Cool Preview Tips & Tricks

Posted on 13/11/09

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screen-shot-2009-11-09-at-203511The Preview utility included on Mac OS X is a dark horse. It offers far more than just a great PDF and image viewer. There are many useful features included in such a simple and apparently boring application. Well, I think it’s high time that it was brought in to the spotlight and for all of its functionality to be recognized. So, with that in mind, I thought I’d share with you 3 of the lesser-known features that the utility provides you.

Save images from the clipboard.

If you have no graphics editing software on your Mac, this will be very useful to you. Sometimes, like when using the operating system’s screenshoting features, you may find yourself in a position whereby you have an image on your clipboared that you wish to save as a pure image file but have nowhere in which to paste it. To do this, launch Preview and then press Command-N. Doing so will open a dialog containing the image you just pasted. If you then went to save your image, press Command-S, enter and filename and select and format and location in which the file is to be exported.

Adjust image size.

I often am faced with problem of having some massive images that I need to resize and optimize for online usage. In Preview, open the image(s) that you wish to resize, select Tools->Adjust Size, select the image size and measurement it is in, then click OK.

Adjust image colour.

In the same way that there is a size adjustment option, there’s one for colour. It can also be found under the Tools menu.

Annotation.

The application also allows for annotation of PDF or image files for the purpose of future reference. This can be accessed via the “Annotate” option in the main toolbar. Below is an example:

screen-shot-2009-11-12-at-191353

Hopefully, you have enjoyed this post and learned something of use.

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