Mac OSX's Preview - hidden jems

For the most part, there are certain workhorse applications I use daily, such as Adobe Photoshop & Acrobat for heavy lifting on my projects. That said, for most of my other regular everyday computer usage, I don't require the power and overhead of those applications. Enter Mac OSX's PREVIEW.

The Preview application does quite a bit more than just reading PDFs or viewing common image formats. Most users never bother browsing through it's menus. In actuality, Preview is a very versatile little program. For instance, without having the Adobe Acrobat suite installed, you can Annotate PDF's, Delete Pages, Rearrange Pages, even Merge PDFs.

Most importantly for me though, are it's image editing capabilities. From basics such as Cropping, resizing, and rotation to color/exposure adjustments, and Alpha Mask Extractions. For producitvity purposes, it's capable of doing many of these operations in Batch mode as well.

An added benefit to using Mac OSX's implementation of PDF in preview, is that you are not subject to the same recent security flaws found in Adobe's PDF product. Don't forget there's also PRINT to PDF built right into the operating system.