Software Tutorial – Using Preview (Mac)

A quick introduction to Apple’s Preview application for OS X.

Preview is a Macintosh application that comes bundled on all Macintosh systems. Preview is designed in its simplest form to open image files in a variety of formats, including common formats like PDF, JPEG, TIFF and PNG. Multiple files can be opened simultaneously and viewed in sequences using Preview’s navigational aids.

Images can be cropped, portions selected and than saved in the same or different formats. You can pull a selection out of an image by selecting the following command after selecting a portion of an image. Choose “New from Clipboard”, and Preview creates a new image file with the clipboard contents. Selection can be rectangular, elliptical, or random with a lasso tool. Images can be rotated both clockwise and counterclockwise. You can adjust contrast, brightness, tint and saturation. The ability to do auto-leveling of an image is possible in Preview, though not as sophisticated as Photoshop.

Once your images are cleaned up and ready, you can play them in a slideshow using built-in Apple transitions across all Mac OS compliant applications. Preview is the default PDF viewer for Mac OS X and it is much much faster than Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. Multiple page PDFs can be viewed by thumbnails or by a table of content. Then searches can be performed which yields a list of pages with the search term. Text can be selected by click and drag methods. Even columns of text can be selected holding down the option key while click and dragging. You can add annotations to PDFs, but they become permanent as part of the PDF if you save the file. Be careful! You can also add notes to PDF files that will become a permanent part of the file if you save the file. Options for saving PDFs include appling Quartz filters including grayscale, black & white, and PDFX-3 compatible PDF files. If an alpha channel exist in the image, the PDF can include this alpha information. Lastly, PDFs can be encrypted for security reasons with a password of your choosing.

Read More

• Dealing With Winmail.dat Problems
• Quick and Easy Guide to Screenshots
• Improve Speed with Small Images
• Apple Software Fixes Windows Print Headache
• An Intro to Software Copyright

You can also subscribe to our newsletter or browse our archives.

Join the Discussion

Leave a Reply