Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to Crop, Resize,
and Export an image using Preview.
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If you need to change an image by Cropping it, Resizing it,
and then Exporting it in some different format you can do that all in the Preview
Tool that comes with your Mac. You don't need a third party app for that.
So I'm going to double click on a JPEG image here in the Finder. It's going to open it up
in Preview by default. Now the first thing I may want to do is crop an image. After all if
you want to get something to a smaller size the first thing they want to do is crop out
unnecessary parts of the image. There is a crop tool but it is usually grayed out.
What's happening here is you need to select something first. So when you're working with
an image you should have a crosshair cursor here and you can just click and drag to where
you want and then grab any of the edges or corners. Figure out what part of the image
you want. I'll just crop out some of the edges here. Then you can use the Crop Tool. You can
always go to the Markup Tools here and then click on the selection tool to make sure that you get
the selection rectangle there and then can go ahead and use Crop or just Command K.
So now I've trimmed a lot here. The file is already going to be smaller if I Export it.
Next let's resize the image. Often when an image is too big it's because it is a high
resolution image and you may not need a high resolution image in your current situation. So,
you can go to Tools and then Adjust Size. Now you get this pretty complex little dialogue box here
and you could resize using this. You just need to take the time to learn how this tool works. You've
got Fit Into and you can select a certain number of pixels. Or you can choose your own here. Now,
by default it is going to be set to percent. So if I wanted to say resize everything by 50% I
can easily just type 50 there and it is going to resize everything and you'll see the resulting
size here and the resulting file size as well. Now you could change this to pixels and then
you could actually see the real pixels here. Say if I want something to be 800 pixels wide
it will automatically do the height to match the width and I can distort the image by changing one
dimension but not the other. In general you want to have these locked. Set the width or the height.
Resolution really doesn't matter. Unless you're doing special print
work a pixel is a pixel. Having 300 pixels per inch or 72 pixels per inch
doesn't really matter. These checkboxes here, this one Scale proportionally maps
to this same function. Then you want to have Resample Image turned On otherwise
you can't change the number of pixels. It is just going to change the resolution. Again,
that's probably not what you want to do. So you get the resulting size here and you can click OK.
So now you've got a much smaller image there. Let's zoom in a bit and we can
see it is still a pretty decent quality but obviously it is going to be a much smaller
file. It has been saving the changes this whole time as that is how Preview works.
If I get information on the file here now it will be much smaller than it was
before. So at this point I could just Close and leave Preview and I'm set. I don't need to Export.
But exporting will help you convert it to another file format or a different quality
level. Let's go to File and then Export and here this allows me to Export using various
formats. HEIC is the new modern format that will highly compress an image but still keep
the quality. But it is not compatible with older computers. Then you could choose JPEG
or some other standards here as well. When you choose HEIC or JPEG you do get to choose
quality. So I can lessen the quality here and export a copy. So it is not going to
change the original when you Export. This will be a new copy and you can see it is
going to be smaller size but lower quality. Let's do that and if I Quick Look this image
here it's definitely lower quality there but I get that smaller file size as a benefit.
Now if you're thinking that this isn't very many options when exporting. There are other
formats and maybe you need to use a special format. Well, hold down the Option Key when
you click this. Now you've got a ton of other formats here. So you can choose one of these
if you need to. One of the things that I've showed you that you may not have liked is the
fact that this image here is now different than the original. The cropping and resizing
has been automatically saved and I've changed the original image. What if I didn't want to do that?
Okay, I'm going to do Undo here and go back to the original image.
So now I've taken away the cropping, I've taken away the resize. If I Get Info here you can see
I'm back to a full size image. A quick way in Preview to actually Crop and create a new image
at the same time is to select and then instead of cropping, do a quick Edit, Copy or just Command C.
Then a quick File, New From Clipboard, or Command N. So Command C, Command N and now
I've got a new unsaved document that's been cropped to the size. I have left the original
one alone. Now I can go in with this new one and Adjust Size. Change the size here and then Export
and then Save this out. If I want I don't even need to save this file here. I can just
Delete that one and I've got my original file still intact. I've got the new file here,
cropped, resized, and exported. You can also select various Command C, Command N, and
do your resizing. Then instead of saving or exporting click the Share button here
and then you can click, say Mail, and it will automatically attach that image to
a new Mail message. You can Send this and never have to save or export a new copy.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.