Preview on your Mac is not only a useful application for viewing PDF files and photos. The preview application can do much more, namely edit photos & images.
In this article, I'll show you how to use Preview to edit images, including scaling images to size, rotating images, adding text or icons to images, and adjusting the colors of an image.
Preview for Mac is a handy application that basically gives you a small photo editor available on your Mac.
To open an image preview, simply double-click on an image file. If you are using another application to open images, right-click the image and select open with preview.
It is also possible to open preview only, open the Application folder and select preview from the list. It is even faster to press the CMD and space bar at the same time and open the preview via Spotlight.
Preview Mac: The all-rounder for image editing
Rotate image in preview
Rotate or rotate an image on a Mac through the preview is applean egg. You open the image in preview and click on the rotate icon in the preview toolbar.
This rotates the image 90 degrees each time.
Crop image
If you only need a specific part of an image, you can also crop it using preview.
You open the image in preview and select a box anywhere in the image by clicking and dragging. It is a square box that you select.
Then, in the Preview menu, go to Tools and select Crop. You can also press CMD + K on your keyboard.
Adjust image size
Select Tools from the Preview menu and select Resize to open the Resize dialog box, which allows you to adjust the size of the image.
Preview supports many units of measure, including pixels. By default, the image is resized proportionally, maintaining its original aspect ratio to ensure that the resized image does not look stretched or smoothed out.
Image resizing programs like this one are useful for reducing the size of images so that they don't take up as much of the viewable area or space on the disk.
Preview is not ideal for enlarging an image because the inflated image is of lower quality. It is therefore not recommended to enlarge images in any case.
Annotate image
Preview allows you to add icons, text and other shapes to an image, annotating an image.
You open the image and in the task bar you click on the highlight toolbar. You now have an extra toolbar with options to add annotations to the image.
In the toolbar you'll find options to select where to add annotations in the image, sketch, draw, add shapes and text, and more.
Adjust image colors
Preview is one very convenient application that we have now seen in this article, but it also offers possibilities to improve images, one way to do that is by adjusting the colors.
If you adjust the colors of an image, you can make the image even sharper or more retro by applying the sepia effect. Again, you can adjust the preview image to your own liking.
Open the image in preview, in the menu go to Tools and select Adjust Color from the menu. You now have some options to adjust the color scheme of the current image.
If you press the automatic button, preview will automatically adjust the colors and sharpness. In most cases this leads to an extra sharp image with the best color optimization.
Preview is a useful tool for editing images on Mac. Preview has the basic options for editing images, of course for the more specialist user, photo editing such as Photoshop etc. is recommended.
I hope this information has helped you, good luck!
I used preview to create videos from large PDF files (multiple pages) in fullscreen mode. This worked perfectly... now the preview in fullscreen mode always shows which page it is (eg: page 2 or 40) at the top of the screen when I turn to the next page. This wasn't the case in the past. Can't I get that away?
Hello, unfortunately this is no longer possible. When I search I find more people experiencing the same problem without a solution. Greetings, Stefan
Unfortunately I cannot use this function.
You mean you can't use preview? Can you explain what exactly goes wrong? Are you receiving an error message, is the application preview not found, please provide more information, I may be able to help you.
Why is the Preview program becoming increasingly unfriendly? Or am I missing something?
In the older versions, all the editing options I used were possible with key combinations, and it became increasingly clumsy, but since the last system update, even command z and shift command z no longer work for color editing.