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Consequently, if you take digital photos or scan transparencies or prints onto your computer and want to optimize them, you may not need a traditional image editor application at all. Preview can do the job for you.
Check out Leopard Preview's new Tools Menu. If you're familiar with the Tools Menu in OS 10.4 Tiger Preview, you'll note that there are some new selections.
Now, say you've downloaded of photo from your camera, and you're not quite happy with the exposure, color rendering, or other picture attributes. For example, here is a photo of my truck taken last fall. Straight out of the camera (it's an old, 3.2 megapixel unit) to my eyes both color saturation and contrast are washed out, it has a greenish color cast, and it isn't as sharp as it might be.
So, open the image file in Preview and choose Adjust Color from the Tools Menu. A translucent black (reminds me of the palettes in the very stylish new Pixelmator image editor application) floating, color and exposure adjustment palette will appear, with a ten sliders that facilitate adjustment exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, sepia (!), black level, white level, and sharpness.
These sliders give you have real time feedback, and I found that they work beautifully. I love to play with all possibilities, and after my adjustment efforts, my truck photo now looked like this. It definitely has more contrast pop and I like the color balance better, and was also able to make it significantly sharper. I like contrasty pictures.
However, if you're pressed for time, or are not quite sure what adjustment/correction effects you would like, just click the Auto Levels button and the program will make its best guess has to optimum values, automatically adjusting the sliders. You can still tweak individual qualities if you wish before saving the image.
What both surprised and delighted me was how well this all worked, and from one simple palette too. I'm not sure that this isn't the all-round best tool I've ever used for this sort of image correction. It's certainly the most convenient, and has added a great deal of value to the Preview application from my perspective.
But there's more. Preview now has an image scaling and resizing tool as well, allowing you to conveniently and quickly change a photo's resolution. Just select Adjust Size from the Preview of Tools Menu, and either manually enter the desired dimensions in the provided fields, or pull down the menu and choose one of the resolution selections provided. You can also change the resolution of your picture (number of pixels per inch) by setting it in the resolution box.
As with similar tools in image editor applications, you can also select "Scale Proportionally", and the height value will automatically change when you enter a new width value and vice versa, so your picture will keep its original proportions.
There is also a Reassemble Image selection which, when it's turned off, Preview will adjust the image's size by making the existing pixels bigger or smaller, but will not change the number of pixels. However, with Reassemble Image turned on, Preview will add or subtract pixels as necessary to scale your photo up or down, averaging the colors of neighboring pixels when you are scaling up.
Of course, if you need to do more advanced correction such as red eye or spot removal, or retouching, you'll still need an application like Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator or maybe the correction tools in iPhoto will do, but the above-described features are not the totality of Preview's new initiating capabilities by any means. For example Preview can also extract people or objects from photo backgrounds, but we'll save that one for another time.
Charles W. Moore
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