Preview is a very tiny utility that comes with every Mac OS X; it comes with very handy features for you to handle pictures and PDFs. I have introduced how to “Crop your photo instantly with Preview” before, and today, I found some other nice features of Preview that I would like to share with you all.

1. Basic Functions of Preview

The first things you might know about Preview are the basic function other than picture browsing. If you navigate to “Tools“, you could see the following drop-down menu:

You could Adjust Color and/or size of your pictures, rotate and/or flip them on the go. This is good for me especially I just need to flip a picture and upload to my blog; I don’t necessarily open up chunky Adobe Photoshop to these small things.

The other basic functions will include but not limited to “Save As” (To change the file format). Just choose “Save As” under “Files” in the menu bar.

If I lower down the picture quality, I could make the picture size smaller so that it’s optimized to be transfer online.  If you choose different file formats, you will see different options to convert the pictures.  For example, if you convert it to PDF, you can set a password to encrypt the target PDF file.

2. Apply Mark Up/Annotation on the text of PDF files

The Mark Up feature is useful especially for those who work on the documents as a whole group. You can highlight the text, strike through the words that you don’t need, or underline the important points.

In Snow Leopard, Annotation is combined with the Mark Up Tools. You can use Annotation to make notes, add arrows or other shapes in addition to Mark Up tools to draw attention of the readers to the text.

3. Extract Shape

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4. Get Application icon

I use this feature of Preview the most. You can get the icons at maximum resolution and save it as a transparent PNG file. I have previously introduced this function of Preview at “A better way to grab icons without third-party software on Mac“.

5. Merge or Separate PDFs

If you would like to merge two PDFs or Pictures (the pictures will be converted to PDFs of course), just simply open them up with Preview and drag one of them onto the other and combine them together:

If you could see the first page becomes the preview icon of a binder, then the two files have been merged together and you are done if you save it.

That’s for merge, then how about if you just want a page out of a lengthy documentation? Well, just like the Mac OS X, it’s as easy as drag-and-drop. Simply just drag the page you would like to keep in the side panel and drop it to the place you would like to save:

Post Note:

Preview is a small utility comes with Mac OS X, I found it quite handy to deal with daily documents and pictures. Above are some useful tips with Preview, yet this is not all about Preview yet. Of course I will keep posting whenever I found some more new stuffs about Preview, but for now why don’t you explore discover it yourself?