Preview

10.23. Preview Preview is Mac OS Xs built-in graphics viewer, fax viewer, and PDF reader. Its always been teeming with features that most Mac owners never even knew were there
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Preview10.23. PreviewPreview is Mac OS Xs built-in graphics viewer, fax viewer, and PDF reader. Its alwaysbeen teeming with features that most Mac owners never even knew were there—but inLeopard, its become a real powerhouse.10.23.1. Preview as Graphics ViewerPreviews hallmark is its surprising versatility. It can display and manipulate picturessaved in a wide variety of formats, including common graphics formats like JPEG, TIFF,PICT, and GIF; less commonly used formats like BMP, PNG, SGI, TGA, and MacPaint;and even Photoshop, EPS, and PDF graphics. You can even open animated GIFs byadding a Play button to the toolbar, as described below.10.23.1.1. Bunches o graphicsIf you highlight a group of image files in the Finder and open them all at once (forexample, by pressing -O), Preview opens the first one, but lists the thumbnails of thewhole group in the Sidebar. You can walk through them with the and keys, oryou can choose View Slideshow (Shift- -F) to begin a full-screen slideshow.Tip: Use the menu below the Sidebar group to change the sorting order of thesethumbnails.10.23.1.2. Cropping graphicsTo crop graphics in Preview, drag across the part of the graphic that you want to keep. Toredraw, drag the round handles on the dotted rectangle; or, to proceed with the crop,choose Tools Crop. (The keyboard shortcut is -K.)If you dont think youll ever need the original again, save the document. Otherwise,choose File Save As to spin the cropped image out as a separate file, preserving theoriginal in the process.Tip: You can also rotate an image—even a PDF document—in 90-degree increments andthen flip it vertically or horizontally, using the commands in the Tools menu. In fact, ifyou select several thumbnails in the Sidebar first, you can rotate or flip them allsimultaneously.10.23.1.3. Fixing up photosPreview is no Photoshop, but its getting a lot closer. Let us count the ways: • Choose Tools Inspector.A floating palette appears. Click the first tab to see the photos name, when it was taken, its pixel dimensions, and so on. Click the second one for even more geeky photo details, including camera settings like the lens type, ISO setting, focus mode, whether the flash was on, and so on. • ChooseTools Adjust Color. A translucent, floating color-adjustment palette appears, teeming with sliders for brightness, contrast, exposure, saturation (color intensity), temperature and tint (color cast), sharpness, and more. See Figure 10- 15. Figure 10-15. Humble little Preview has grown up into a big, strong mini- Photoshop. You can really fix up a photo if you know what youre doing, using these sliders. Or you can just click the Auto Levels button. It sets all those sliders for you, which generally does an amazing job of making almost any photo look better. • Choose Tools Adjust Size. This command, new in Leopard, lets you adjust a photos resolution, which comes in handy a lot. For example, you can scale an unwieldy10-megapixel, gazillion-by-gazillion-pixel shot down to an ice 640-by- 480 JPEG thats small enough to send by email. Or you can shrink a photo down so it fits within a desktop window, for use as a window background (Section 1.4.1.8). Theres not much to it. Type in the new print dimensions you want for the photo, in inches or whatever units you choose from the pop-up menu. If you like, you can also change the resolution (the number of pixels per inch) by editing the Resolution box.10.23.1.4. Cutting people out of backgroundsHeres a Photoshoppy feature you would never, ever expect to find in a simple viewerlike Preview. You can now extract a person (or anything, really) from its background.Thats handy when you want to clip yourself out of a group shot to use as your iChatportrait, when you want to paste somebody into a new background, or when you break upwith someone and want them out of your photos. • Solid backgrounds. If the background is simple—mostly a solid color or two—you can do this job quickly. Start by making sure the toolbar is visible ( -B). From the Select pop-up menu, choose Instant Alpha. This feature is extremely weird, but here goes: Click the first background color that you want to eliminate. Preview automatically dims out all the pixels that match the color you clicked. Click again in another area to add more of the background to the dimmed patch. POWER USERS CLINIC Scaling and Resampling When youre fooling around with a pictures size and resolution in the Change Si ...