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I recently had to put my Windows machine in the shop, so I fired up an old Macbook a friend gave me.
I have a bunch of graphs I was going to post over on serverfault. They're presently in a webpage. Normally, I'd right-click, copy, launch irfanview, paste, highlight the area I want, then save the selected area, or copy it to the clipboard and paste it into mspaint. If I wanted to draw attention to an area, I'd hit F12, and doodle on it.
It might not be intuitive, but it's what I'm used to after years of Windows.
To be clear, these are large graphs, and I want to highlight the areas of interest, and produce a single image which illustrates the problem.
There's a whole ecosystem in the Mac world I'm unfamiliar with. What's the Mac way to do this? I don't want to take my Windows (and Linux) prejudices into the Mac world. Especially for editing graphics.
mgjk
Posted 2012-06-19T22:05:01.953
Reputation: 1 337
1When your Windows machine gets back from the shop, if it's 7, check out the in-built "Snipping Tool". :) – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 – 2012-06-20T00:23:42.827
@techie007 - I am pretty sure that by using snipping tool to do this, it will cause an already compressed image will be decompressed and then recompressed, causing further quality loss. – Steve Rathbone – 2012-06-20T09:21:53.257
1Not sure how old your MacBook is, but have you tried Preview, the built in viewer app on OS X? Even the older versions should be able to handle cropping and exporting. – Vickash – 2012-06-21T16:55:30.163
@Vickash preview seems capable enough. The Macbook is a 2006 Intel with Snow Leopard, so it's not too bad. Any recommendations for a tool to stitch the clipboard bits back together? MSpaint-ish with a big, resizable canvas? Thanks! – mgjk – 2012-06-21T18:20:31.693
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You can paste pieces back into a Preview doc: open the image you saved, Cmd+A to select the entire thing, copy and paste into the target Preview doc. The counter intuitive part is, Preview doesn't have a File > New option for you to select a size and create a new blank image. You could workaround this by creating a canvas in another image editor like Seashore (http://seashore.sourceforge.net/The_Seashore_Project/About.html). Export a blank doc at the right size, open that in Preview, paste, resize etc, and save your work to a new file. You could also just use Seashore, but it's an old project.
– Vickash – 2012-06-21T18:52:36.790@Vickash, I'll give it a shot. We all get used to the quirks of our environment, I'm sure to any Mac user, Irfanview and MSPaint seems like an abomination. – mgjk – 2012-06-21T19:26:52.060
I actually like IrfanView a lot. Used it for many years on Windows. Like Preview, most people underestimate just how powerful it can be if you know it well. – Vickash – 2012-06-21T21:40:53.520