If you were to choose the most low-key app for macOS, Preview might be one of them. "Preview" is so closely integrated with macOS that people even forget that it is still an App. After all, most of the time, when you mention "preview", you will think of part of the operating system. In fact, the "thin" body of "Preview" contains countless "energy". To make an inappropriate analogy: "Preview" is the floor-sweeping monk in Tianlong Babu.
Regarding images, "Preview" can do more
In macOS, the first thing many people do with Preview is look at images. In fact, the preview is not limited to just looking at pictures. In terms of image processing, the preview can also do more.
resize picture
Usually, all kinds of examination registration websites need to upload personal photos, and at the same time, such websites will have corresponding requirements for the size of the photos; in addition, some platforms will also limit the size of the pictures, such as my party's maximum size requirements for pictures 2.5MB for static. Many times when you see resizing a picture, you will subconsciously think of using a large tool like PS, but using preview can easily solve this problem.
Click the "Show Markup Toolbar" button > "Resize" > enter the corresponding size, and then confirm.
remove background from image
When it comes to pictures, cutouts are indispensable. Taking myself as an example, when writing articles or making PPTs, I often use a lot of pictures. My habit is to take pictures by myself. However, one disadvantage of this approach is that it often requires post-processing of the pictures. The conventional post-processing is to remove the content that affects the subject in the picture.
Click the "Show Markup Toolbar" button in the upper right corner, then click "Instant Alpha" (much like the magic wand in PS), then click the mouse in the background area, and then delete it. This removes the background of the image.
View and remove geographic location information
Geographic location information is a hot topic recently. Weibo, WeChat, and Zhihu all began to display geographic location information. For a time, many people's work and life were talked about by more people.
Regarding geographic location information, in the article Consciousness First, Tools Assisted: Talking about How We Can Distinguish False Information , I mentioned that it can be used to distinguish true and false news. With the help of "Preview", we can view the geographic location information of these images. Similar to this, sometimes in daily life, in order to avoid revealing too much information, it is necessary to remove the geographical location information of the picture, and we can also easily achieve this purpose with the help of "preview".
Click the "Show Inspector" button above > "More Information" > GPS to view or delete the geographic location information.
Create picture from clipboard
With "Preview", we can create an image from the clipboard. This operation mainly involves two aspects, one is to convert the table into a picture, and the other is to save the picture on the network as its own format.
Let's look at the former first. Many times, we need to save the table as a picture, and the routine operation is more complicated. With the help of "Preview", you can quickly get the pictures you want. Select and copy the corresponding part of Excel with the mouse, Command+空格call "Preview", create a file from the clipboard, and save it in the format you need.
Sometimes, when looking for pictures on the Internet, you can use "Preview" to save the picture locally and save it in the format you need. For example, some Apps are not compatible enough with webp pictures. With the help of "Preview", we can avoid this picture format problem. Copy the picture with the mouse, Command+空格call "Preview", create a file from the clipboard, and save it in the format you need.
Extract the icon of the App
Based on the basis of "creating pictures from the clipboard", we can go one step further and use it to extract the icon of the App.
The icons of various apps are often used when writing articles or making PPT. Many times, we may run around looking for it. In fact, using "Preview" can extract the icons of these apps locally.
Find the app you want to extract the icon in "Applications", and then "Show Profile". In the App's profile, select the icon and copy it.
Open "Preview", execute "File" > "New from Clipboard". You can see that the icon of the App has appeared in the file.
Normally, we can see the icon1 for different zoom levels of the app. We can check the specific pixel situation by clicking the info button, and then choose the clearest one among them, export and save it. When exporting, you can choose the corresponding storage format according to your needs.
Picture color adjustment
In the "Preview", you can quickly adjust the coloring of the picture. This is more useful when it is necessary to simply process the color of the picture, especially when it involves a solid color picture and reverses the color of the picture.
The specific method is: "Tools" > "Adjust Color", and adjust the color in the "Adjust Color" panel that appears later.
Drag the slider to achieve the color you want
"Preview", PDF Expert
In addition to pictures, another major function of "Preview" is related to PDF. Although compared with Adobe's Acrobat, it may not be as comprehensive as the latter in terms of functions, but "Preview" is free and lightweight, and it can almost handle those trivial daily tasks.
Specific to the realization of the function, the page sequence of the PDF file can be rearranged through "Preview", a certain part of the file can be split separately or a PDF file can be appended to the existing PDF file, or directly from the Append specific pages from one PDF file directly to another PDF file. As far as personal experience is concerned, the ease of operation and the smoothness of the experience of "Preview" are much better than those of Acrobat.
When doing the following operations, you need to adjust the PDF interface to the thumbnail mode. Go to "View" > "Thumbnail" to adjust to the thumbnail mode.
PDF page reflow
In the thumbnail mode, you can adjust the page order of the PDF file by dragging and dropping the pages of the PDF.
Select the page, hold down the mouse and drag directly
PDF file splitting
In terms of splitting PDF files or extracting specific pages, in my personal opinion, "Preview" is much more convenient than Acrobat. You only need to select the corresponding page, hold down the mouse and drag it out directly to get the corresponding page.
PDF page append
Corresponding to page splitting, we can also add pages through "preview". There are two situations for adding pages. One is to add an existing PDF file to a PDF, and the other is to directly add a specific page in a PDF file to another PDF file.
Select a PDF file and drag it directly to a specific location in the opened PDF file to add pages.
Select a specific page in a PDF file and drag it directly to a certain position in another PDF file to add pages.
PDF file color optimization
Faint text is a common problem encountered when scanning physical documents to PDF. At this time, the first reaction of many people may be to re-scan a page, or search for special editing software to process it. But the original file may not be at hand at this time, and PDF editors with such functions are often not cheap. In fact, the "filter" that comes with "Preview" can deal with this kind of problem very well.
The operation steps are also very simple: open the PDF to be processed with preview, then "File" > "Export...". At the bottom of the pop-up dialog box, keep the "PDF" in the "Format" and select "Lightness Decrease" from the "Quartz Filter" and save it.
Rich functions are provided under the Quartz filter
For the brightness (lightness) adjustment, the picture below is the effect of my test. The picture is a PDF file generated by my phone's camera scan function. The left picture is the original PDF file, and the right picture is the darkened file.
The blurry text is written in pencil, pay attention to the left and right changes
Similarly, if your scan has too much contrast and you want to lighten the text, you can select the Lightness Increase filter. If you are curious about the effects of other filters, you can refer to the picture below.
Among the options of a bunch of Quartz filters, there is a handsome guy - "Reduce File Size". This is PDF file compression. I believe that everyone should be familiar with this function, so I won’t expand too much here. However, from a personal point of view, it seems inappropriate for such an important function to be hidden in such a small corner.
PDF file signature
In addition to the functions mentioned above, it is also very convenient to sign PDF files through "Preview". This also does not lose Adobe Acrobat.
Click the "Show Markup Toolbar" button in the upper right corner, then click "Signature" (if you don't have a signature, you can create one by the way), and then drag the created "Signature" to the specified position.
file type conversion
In addition to the functions mentioned above, the file type conversion between images and PDFs can also be realized through "Preview". This conversion not only includes the conversion between different picture formats, but also the mutual conversion between pictures and PDF.
Use "Preview" to open the picture, and then click "File" > "Export to PDF" to convert the file to a picture. A similar method can realize the conversion between PDF to image or between image formats.
Merge multiple images into PDF
After mastering the above-mentioned methods proficiently, we can combine the above methods to form a "big trick"-creating PDF by merging multiple images. There are various methods, such as converting the file type and adding pages to form a PDF file.
The above are all the functions of this article, I hope you can also make good use of these hidden functions in Preview.