Crop your photo instantly with Preview

So you have a picture and you would like to cut out the portion you want; normally I will launch Adobe Photoshop and use the crop tool to cut out the portion of the photo. Yet it is felt-to-be-year-long when you just simply want to crop the photo and Photoshop takes quite a long time to start up especially for those who doesn’t have a very powerful machine.

(Apple Inc. has all the credits of this photo)

I just found out a tips today and you can use everyday. On Mac OS X, if you just double click the picture (not in iPhoto), you will view the picture in Preview by default of the system. For this post, I open Apple’s official photo of Snow Leopard:As you can see, the photo has a big empty area which you probably don’t need(Apple has it because this is their background photo and they use the blank area for text.). So I use my cursor to select the area I want as shown in the picture below:

Selected Region

Now, you can just hit “Command” + “K” to crop out the selected area. If you don’t want an extra copy, just hit “Command” + “S” or go to “File“–>”Save“. But if you don’t want to overwrite your original copy, then you should hit “Shift“+”Command“+”S” or go to “File“–>”Save As“.

Final copy

And you will obtain your picture with the selected area:For simple photo-cropping, you don’t need to use any other software from now on as Mac OS X has already provided you the best native tool.