Rotating and Resizing an Image in Preview

When you're creating a presentation, composing a Word document, or editing a web page, you might have a an image that is bigger than you need. You want to cut-out just a portion of it to use, and size it to fit, as well.

You don't need a power-house image editor like PhotoShop to do this. Preview, in Mac OS X 10.5 and later, gives you the tools to crop and resize images - quickly and easily.

"Cut-out" the Image
Open an image in Preview. Click "Select" in the toolbar. Then, click-and-drag diagonally across the portion of the image you wish to cut-out.

You can adjust the selection by clicking-and-dragging the handles (little circles). Once you have it just right, choose "Crop" from the Tools menu. Now, you have just the part of the image you want.

Resize the Image
You can resize the image to roughly or exactly to dimensions you need.

With the image still open, select "Adjust Size..." from the Tools menu. The Image Dimensions pane of options is displayed. You can resize the image by pixels, percentage, inches, cm (centimeters), millimeters (mm) or points.

By default, when you enter one dimension (Width or Height), Preview will autmatically enter the other dimension portionally so that you're image doesn't look stretched or squeezed.

Test the Dimensions
Enter the dimensions you think will work and click OK. If the image size doesn't look quite right, Undo (select "Undo Size Change" from the Edit menu), and try again.

Resizing Tip: If you're editing the image for a document that will be viewed onscreen, such a PowerPoint preso or web page, select "Actual Size" from the View menu. In the Image Dimensions pane, make sure the Resolution is set to "72" and use pixels to adjust the size of the image. This will help you visually match the size of what you're seeing in Preview with what you need in your document.