4 Ways To Create Graphics on Your Mac Without Third-Party Apps

If you just need to create simple graphics and don't have a third-party app installed or the skills needed to use complex software, you can always use Pages, Keynote, Freeform or Preview. All of those come with your Mac.
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Video Transcript: Gary with MacMost here. Let me show you how to create simple graphics on your Mac without a third party app. 
Let's say you want to create a relatively simple graphic. An image that you can post on social media or send to people over email. You can, of course, use third party apps to do this. You can use PhotoShop, you can use Pixelmator Pro, provided you have those apps and you know how to use them. But let's just use tools that come with your Mac to do this. Each of these has advantages and disadvantages. I'm going to show you how to just create a canvas to put an image on. I'm going to show you how to add text, some graphics, bring in some images, bring in a photo, and even draw. 
Let's start here by using Pages. So Pages, of course, is a word processor. It's not ideal for this but it does have a good page layout mode that you can use to create graphics. In Pages here I'm going to create a simple blank layout document. Now when you do that you'll notice that it's kind of page shaped. Let's say we want to create a horizontal graphic about 800 by 600. You can do that by changing the page size here. You need to go to file and then Page Setup to do this. Then go to Paper Size. Then do Manage Custom Sizes. So let's go and create a new one here. Then let's make it 8 by 6. The idea is we want something generally to be in an 8 by 6 or 4 by 3 ratio here. We'll select OK and you'll see it sets the paper size to this so when I click OK you can see the paper now changes size. Now I've got a nice blank canvas. First let's go and create a background to draw on. You can do that in Pages if you've got nothing else selected. So you can click on the Background and select nothing else. Under Format you've got Background here. So let's set it to, say, a Gradient Fill and we can set the two colors. Let's have it go from pure white to say a very light blue like that. So now we've got a background. 
Now let's add some Text. I'll click on the Text tool up here. It will add a Textbox. Let's type the words Happy Birthday and then I'm going to select it by using Command A to select All. Let's go to Format Text, Center it. Let's pick a more festive font. So just anything you may happen to have. Let's increase the size and you can also change the color. Now we've got that there. Let's go and add a basic graphic. You've got all these shapes here that are available in Pages. Click there to select one. These are things like square, circles and all of that. But you'll notice that the further down you go the more detailed the shapes get. Let's Search for birthday and find out what we've got. We see here we've got somethings. Take the birthday cake, put it here, put it near the top. We can go to Format, Style and change its color. So let's change the Fill to something else. A color like that or maybe something like that. You can do more with Shapes, of course. But let's just leave it at that for now. 
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Now that you have that let's say there's more than just these basic shapes that you want to add in. Let's say you've got some graphics, like you've got these two graphics here. You can add these by dragging them in. So let's drag the balloons one in and you can see just add it in. We can grab one of the little handles here and shrink it down. We can even hold the Command Key down and grab and then drag one of the handles to rotate. To get rid of the background there we can go to Format, Image and Remove Background. We can do that and we can do it with the presents here as well. Let's shrink those. Let's rotate them a bit. Let's put them here and Remove Background on those as well. There we go.  
Let's say we want to add a photo. Now a photo could be another file like one of these. But let's say we want to go right from the Photos App. You can do that! You can Drag & Drop right from the Photos App. Have the Photos App in one Window and Pages in another. Drag & Drop from one to the other and it will insert it in. Now I can resize this. If I want to Crop it I can double-click it and notice how I can grab the edges now and it will Crop like that. If I want to remove the background I can try that as well. Under Format, Image, Remove Background will work on photos as long as it is a pretty clear background. So there, Remove Background. Now that I've got the background removed I can maybe scale this up a bit here. Let's say it's Jack's birthday. Why not! 
There's one last thing Draw. Drawing in Pages isn't very easy. It is really not meant for that. But you can do some things. For instance you can go to Shape here and you've got this Pen Tool. You can't just drag and draw like it is an Apple Pencil on an iPad or something like that. But you can click and click again to draw a line. I'm going to Undo that. Instead I'm going to click once and then click again but Hold and then drag to draw a curve. Then I'm going to release like this, go out here and click to do another curve and you can do somethings like this. So I can draw like that. I'm just going to hit Escape so I don't draw another point there and I've got like a line like that. So you can do some basic stuff. Then you can go to Format, Style and you can do different things with the line here. Change the size. Change the color. You know just to get a basic drawing like that. 
Now the next thing we need to do is Export it as an image. Now you can go to File, and then go to Export To and Images is one of the options. So you can choose here the type of image and then I'm going to Save. I'm going to choose the Desktop to Save this to. I'll call this Birthday and Export. It's going to create this Folder and in this Folder is going to be an image for each page. There's only one page so there's only one thing there. So you may just want to drag that out and get rid of a folder. Now you've got this image here that you've created in Pages. The cool thing is you can go back into Pages and Edit this. So I would Save this out and then you can use it again or maybe change it later on if you want. 
Another way to Export is to go to File and then Print.  Then instead of printing click on the PDF Menu and choose Open in Preview. That opens it up and now you can save it as a PDF if you like. You can also Export from Pages as a PDF. But you can also go to File, Export and export this as an image. So let's choose JPEG. You can even choose the quality level here. Let's just call this Birthday 2 and I will save it to the Desktop. The nice thing about this is it's nice and clean. You just get this one file. No folder and all of that. 
Now next let's look at doing that in Keynote. It's very similar in Keynote. But here you would just create a basic presentation. You can use one of these Templates. I'm going to use Basic White. The first downside is a minor one. You get these default fields. I'm just going to select them All and Delete them. Now I get a slide. The slide is a like more like an image than a page in Pages is. As a matter of fact if you go to Document and go to Slide Size, choose Custom Size, you can actually choose pixels. So I can choose exactly 800 by 600 pixels and now you can see that's what I get here. Now to set a background I could go to Format, just like in Pages, as long as nothing else is selected I'm actually setting the background for the slide and I can set that up here. Make it just like in Pages. I can create text just like in Pages, like this. I can go to Format, Text, select a different Font here. So let's choose this one and make it much bigger. Put that in the Center. The same shapes are available here. So we can search for cake, find this one. Stick it up here. Change its Style to a color like that. We can Drag & Drop an image in. Let's drag the balloons image in. Let's drag the presents image in. We can shrink these and rotate them the same way we did in Pages. Holding the Command Key, go to Format Image and Remove the Background for each one of these. We can bring in a photo the same way. So let's bring this same photo in here. I'll drag and drop it in. It's going to fill the slide which is handy for creating presentations but you can just shrink it back down. Double-click to Crop it. Or I can remove the background on this one as well and then resize like that. For drawing it works the same as it did in Pages. So really no special drawing tools here. You have to use the pen. Then you just have to draw either line. Then when you're happy with your image you can now Export it. Exporting options are similar. Do Images it's going to create a folder full of images. If you do Print you can open it in Preview and Export it that way. The nice thing here though is that you are getting something that is a specific pixel size rather than having to convert inches to pixels that you would in Pages. I also like the fact that in Keynote you have slides so you can keep adding slides. You can add a blank slide and have another image here. So if this is a large project with several graphics you want to create you can create them all as individual slides and have them in the same document. You can do the same thing in Pages but it seems to make a lot more sense here. It is easy to rearrange and drag them and Control Click on one and even duplicate it so you can have two variations of the same thing here in Keynote. 
Let's look at using another app, Freeform. So Freeform is made for creating graphics. Let's go and create a board here. Now there's no specific size. It's an infinite canvas in every direction. So you kind of got to guess at the size. But you can start by creating a background of a simple rectangle, like this and get it to be the size you want. You can see here when I drag I get the sizes. So I can create something that it's the width, say, 800 pixels by 600 pixels and let me zoom out a bit. So now I can take this. If I click on it and click on the Fill there I can change the color of the Fill like that. So I can create this background and do everything else on top of it. Then from there on it is kind of like working in Pages and Keynote. But the interface is a bit different. So let's type Happy Birthday in a Textbox, like this. You have this interface here to mess with the text. You have to select it. I'm going to use Command A to select it All. I can, you know, Bold it here. If I want to change the Font I click here and Show Fonts and I can choose something else, like that. I can change the size and then here is where I can go and change the color, like that. A little different there. Do have the same shapes. So we can search for cake and there's the cake. We can click on it. Let's change the color of the cake. You can do the same thing here with images. But it's a little different. You want to make sure you drag into the shape here else it is going to fill the shape with that image. But you drag it outside there and you get this frame around it. But if you Control Click, two-finger click or right click you can turn Off the shadow and round corners, although round corners doesn't matter here because there is nothing in the corners. Then I can Hold the Command Key down and rotate it, like that. Put it in position. If I want to get rid of the background, it's under Format, Image and I can Remove the Background like that. Let's bring the presents in here. Let's go and Drag & Drop from Photos. You can do that from here as well. So I'll drag Jack in here being careful not to drag onto the shape. Then once Jack's in here I can click once. I can click this Cropping tool here and crop or I can use the same image from Remove Background here, like that. There's Jack. Now drawing tools work great in Freeform on the iPad or iPhone but not on the Mac. There's nothing for it so you just have to use the same tool here to draw like a little squiggle, if you want, like that. You know you can put this where you want and click on it and change its color and thickness and all of that stuff. So you can do a little bit of drawing here. Now to Export this there is no export for As Image. You have to export as a PDF. That's all you can do. But you can use that trick where you Print Board and then you see Print right there and you choose Open in Preview. Now that it is in Preview you can Export it in a format you want. But you're going to get a lot of extra space around it. One of the things you can do here is you can select an area. Use the Markup Tools here, use the Selection Tool and select just this area here. Then you do Command K for Tools and Crop to crop it first. Now export that as an image and you can Save this Freeform board. Keep it around till you change or reuse later. 
Now one more way to do it I want to show you is to use Preview. So Preview is a tool that can work with Images. Let's launch it by itself. Let's create a new one. Well, that's the first problem. You can't. You can create New From Clipboard but you can't just create a new blank Preview document. So, what you can do is instead of a new document from there take a screenshot and do it from a selection. If you see something like plain white space that's on your desktop or maybe on a document or something you can do that and get plain white. If not you just grab something you want to use as the background, like that. Now you can see how I've gotten that as the background there. What you need to do next is to size it. So go to Tools and then Adjust Size. Then here you can set the size. Turn Off the lock. Now you can set it to whatever you want. 800 by 600. Now if you don't like that background because you just chose it at random from the screen, do a Command A to select All and a Delete and it is gone. Now go to the Markup Tools and the first thing you want to do is create a nice background. So create a rectangle shape and then move it to the edges and you can see the edges right there. So there's like beyond the edge and then drag it out here and y0u can see there's beyond the edge right there. Then basically you have this rectangle that is larger than the whole thing. That could be your background. Click here and you can set a color for it, like that. Now we can start drawing. We're actually drawing on a PNG image now. So it is not a document like Pages or Keynote or even Freeform. It's actually an image we're working with. You can draw text with the Textbox here. Let's select All and then change the style here. Let's go here and we can choose anything we want. Let's choose, for instance, this one and then we can make bigger and we can change the size. There are no shapes so you won't be able to use the birthday cake there. But if you just have images like this you can use them. Can you drag and drop them in. No, you can't. But you can bring them in by opening them in Preview. Usually if you double-click on an image it's going to open in Preview anyway. So as soon as it does you do Command A, for select All. Command C for Copy. Switch to this one and Command V for Paste. Now you've got a really big version of that. You can shrink it by grabbing the corners. It's really hard sometimes if it is really big. But you can. Can you rotate it? Yes and No. Yes if you have a trackpad. Two fingers rotates it. If you don't have a trackpad there's no way to rotate in Preview. Can you get rid of the background from this? No you can't. You had to do that in advance. So, I'm going to delete this. I'm going to go back to this here and instead of selecting All, like I did before, I'm instead going to Control Click, right click, or two-finger click and use Copy Subject. Now when I Paste In you can see the background is removed. I still have to shrink it down. It is a little difficult to work with. Then I can rotate it and then I can go the same thing with presents. Can I bring an image in from Photos? Well, you can't Drag & Drop again. But you can select in Photos and Copy and then go into Preview and Paste. But could I have copied the subject? Yes, I could. I can go back to Photos instead. Go in here and then Control Click on it, Copy subject, and now Paste just Jack in there. Now finally something that Preview does that does better than the others do which is drawing. You have multiple drawing tools. You've got two. You've got one called Sketch and one called Draw. Now it doesn't work very well if you've got something behind it. I'm going to move this out of the way. Now before you draw you want to select a line color here. So we'll choose something like that and then I'm going to just draw. Now the sketch tool, of you draw something that's close to a shape like a circle, it will make it a perfect circle. But you can click here to have it go back to exactly what you drew. So if you try to draw a perfect circle, square, arrows, things like that then use Sketch. If you want to draw whatever you want use this tool here which is the Draw Tool. You want to make sure that you choose a good line size here before using it. Then you can draw whatever you want and it will stay like that. So you have an actual real drawing tool. I can bring in this background again and there I go. Now I can just go to File, Export, and I can export directly to an image. I can also just Save this. If I just do Command S for Save it's going to save it as an image. But the disadvantage is once I save it all of these individual elements are gone. It's all just printed onto the image. So there's really no way to modify it later on. 
So it can be a useful Tool if you know Preview really well and use it for lots of things and you need to draw freehand. Then using Preview is a decent option. Otherwise Keynote is probably the best option although Freeform is an interesting alternative if you like that. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
Comments: 4 Responses to “4 Ways To Create Graphics on Your Mac Without Third-Party Apps”

Sheldon
5 months ago
Thanks bunches
Paige
Loved this comparison. Clear and concise and useful as are all your videos. Thank you!! 🙏 Question… For someone who’s quite adept with Keynote tools, can you suggest a 3rd party graphics app without a steep learning curve? Thx!!
Gary Rosenzweig
Paige: Seems that Pixelmator Pro is the clear answer now. Since Apple is acquiring it, the skills you'll get in learning that will probably pay off in lots of ways.
Jeanne Bragg
This is great. As always, I learned a couple of new things and I consider myself Mac proficient (thanks to you)!
I didn't know you could remove the background that easily (in the past I used Instant Alpha) and that's a great time saver, plus the command D key to save directly to the desktop.
Thanks bunches.