There was a time when Preview let you view your images and PDF documents and was happy to be in your service as a tiny little application you hardly ever noticed. Then came Leopard and Preview suddenly found itself on the shiny new Dock right beside iTunes. So what had changed? Had Apple run out of important applications to place on the Dock or had Preview been elevated to the status of an important application itself?
Turns out, it was the latter case. Not only does Leopard’s Preview let you do the mundane tasks such as viewing a group of photos, showing them off in a slideshow, reading PDF documents, searching through them, and so forth, it now also lets you put annotations on those documents and images, extract images from their backgrounds, bookmark your favorite files and has a few mark up tools as well. It has turned from a simple previewing application to a previewing-and-basic-editing application and we are definitely not complaining. Below is a screenshot of the new options added to the Preview toolbar in Leopard (click on it to enlarge it):
One of the features I mentioned above was extracting images from their backgrounds. TUAW brings us news that Murphy Mac has published an article about how to achieve exactly that using the new Preview app in Leopard. There is also an accompanying screencast in case words are not enough to convey the deeply philosophical and scientifically complex process of using the ‘Extract Shape’ and ‘Instant Alpha’ tools. So go ahead and revel in the sheer delight of extracting famous actors out of the paparazzi pictures and sticking them next to you in your barn (do people still do that?).
I had heard all about preview's enhancements, but I never really realised how many options are there in that customise toolbar thing! Who knew! I went around search in the menubar and whatnot, only to realise Aayush has done it again. Foxed, I say, foxed!
LOL! Thanks! I was surprised by the sheer number of buttons on that thing myself, which is why I decided to include a sneak peak of it. :)
but why did apple have to take out a very useful feature from the old preview? we used to be able to drag the preview image from the side drawer and drag it to the trash and the actual file in the finder goes to the trash too. i found it very useful for previewing and deleting photos once i uploaded them to the mac.
You can still press ⌘⌫ while viewing any image to send it to the Trash. :)
The info button is very useful. Now for some wishful thinking: Why don´t Apple use Preview´s Info to check a batch of pictures? I would like to be able to see what color space, resoultion, and size a picture has without actually opening it. Much like Adobes Bridge (and possibly Aperture which I haven´t used) but in the simple and efficient form that Apple specialises in.
thank you aayush for the tip! everything is good in my world again :)