Preview doesn’t just select rectangular and square areas, though you can crop a round selection. Use the Selection tool and the Crop tool to crop your image. Everything outside of the selection area will be deleted from your image. When you’ve got everything just right, click on the Crop to Selection icon in the toolbar or select Crop from the menu (Tools > Crop). Fine tune your selection by grabbing the corners or edges of your selection and growing or shrinking the crop area. If you’ve used other tools already, the Rectangular Selection tool is available in the Tools menu (Tools > Rectangular Selection) or by clicking the Selection Tools icon.ĭrag your cursor so that the entire area to be included in the final image is incorporated in the selection. The Rectangular Selection tool is your default in Preview, so if you haven’t started doing anything else, you can drag your cursor around on your image to select your crop area. Select an area in one Preview image, copy it to the clipboard, and create a second Preview image with just the selection area. Pretty much any image or image selection will work. This doesn’t just work for images copied in your browser, though. Create a new image from your clipboard's contents. Preview will create a new image from your clipboard contents. Just copy the image to your clipboard and then choose File > New From Clipboard. If you want to save and edit an image from the internet, you don’t actually have to save it at all. Click the Show Edit Toolbar icon or find everything in the Tools menu. Most of them are available in the Tools menu, but you can also toggle the Edit Toolbar on and off by clicking the pen icon in Preview’s main toolbar. Preview has some pretty great image editing tools, but first you need to get at them. By the time we’re done, you’ll know Preview inside and out and have a new respect for this neglected image editor.

We’ll take a look at some of the often overlooked tools inside Preview and walk through each of them individually. While Preview is certainly a great app for browsing images, it’s also got a lot of options for editing and refining images, too. Preview is the default PDF and image viewer in OS X, but many users never get further than that.

Mac photo preview looks different