Crop, Resize and Compress Images With Pixelmator Pro

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to Crop, Resize, and Compress an image using Pixelmator Pro.

So Pixelmator Pro is an app that you can get in the Mac App Store. It was recently acquired by Apple so it's an official Apple App now. You can use it as a Photoshop alternative to do all sorts of things with images. Right now I'm going to show you how to Crop, Resize, and Export in a compressed format.

The first thing you can do is get your image into Pixelmator Pro. You can do this so many different ways. For instance, if it is a photo in the Photos App you can select the photo, like this one. You can go to Image and then Edit With and then select Pixelmator Pro here. If Pixelmator Pro is the last one you used it should appear here at the top. Then there's just a keyboard shortcut, Command and Return. So you can use it to quickly open up this image in Pixelmator Pro. You could also go to the image, Edit it, Click here and then use Pixelmator Pro here as an extension. But then you don't get all the exporting options. So I'm not going to use it here in this tutorial. Or you could start in Pixelmator Pro. Go to File, and then New From Photos. Then you could select a photo from your Photos Library and you can edit it that way. Or you can have an image in the Finder and you can Control Click it, and select Open With, and then Pixelmator Pro or drag it to the Pixelmator Pro app in your Dock.

Any of those methods will take you into Pixelmator Pro like you see now. You have the full range of features and functions. But by opening it from Photos you have the ability to use File and Save and save the changes back to the Photos Library. You don't have to but the option is there. You can still Revert to Original in Photos but any changes you make will actually show up in your Photos Library.

But first, let's Crop. Cropping is under Tools and you can see Crop here. The easiest way to get to it is just using the C key. It is not even Command C. It's just C. Now you're in Cropping mode. You can grab the corners or the middle of the sides and drag inward to Crop. Once you've cropped a little bit you can drag the cropped area around like this to select the area that you want and keep adjusting. If you need a specific size you can go to the right sidebar here and if it is set to Custom Size you can set a specific width and height. So if I know I need something that's 3000 pixels by 2000 pixels you can see how it adjusts that there and now I can move this around and I'll get something exactly that size. I can also click here and then Choose from all these different aspect ratios. So if I want something square, for instance, I can select this and now I've got something exactly square. If I want something that's 3 x 2 I can select this and you can even set it to Always Remember your last choice. If you're set to a specific ratio when you drag the corners or side it stays with that ratio like that. You can also choose Auto Crop to let Pixelmator Pro figure out some good cropping. Get rid of some things around the edges that may not add to the photo. You've got Straightening to be able to rotate a little bit. Perspective Options here. If your photos needs a little bit of perspective correction. Then when you get what you want you click the Apply button here and it applies the crop.

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How about Resizing the image. You go to Image here. You've got Canvas Size which is another way to crop. But Image Size will actually shrink the image. So you can set a specific width and height and you can do it in pixels or inches or any other measurement. You can choose a resolution. In most cases you're going to want pixels. Like maybe you're uploading to a website and it should be 2000 pixels wide. As long as you have Scale Proportionately turned on adjusting the width or the height will adjust the other one automatically. Unless you're doing something very specific with printing you just want to leave the resolution and resampling alone and use it like this. So I'll get something that is 2000 by 1300 pixels here if I click Okay it resizes it.

If you're trying to make the image files smaller resizing is always a smart thing to do first before you worry about file compression. But you don't have to actually use the image size tool here to do that at all. As a matter of fact I'm going to Undo that here so I'm back to the regular size because you can take care of it when you export without changing your original image.

So now to Export I'm going to go to File and then Export. I can use Command E to get there as well. So the first thing I want to do is select the format. So to make this very compatible with all sorts of different systems and websites, I'm just going to switch to JPEG. When I switch to JPEG I can now select the quality. So the quality is going to determine not just the quality of the photo but also the size. So here, for instance, I can see this is 1.8 MB. 72% quality. If I bring the quality down a little bit you can see I get it down to 1.3 MB. Basically anything between 50 and 80% is good for most uses. At 90% and above it is really hard to tell the difference just casually looking at a photo. But the other thing you may want to do is Resize here. So you can resize using a Custom Size. So, for instance, now I can go to 2000 like before and I can see now it brings the file size down a lot. So 80% at 2000 wide brings it under 600K. I can also go with a percentage. So I can see what happens if it is 50% scaled. In this case it is close. It is a little over1900 pixels wide. I go to, say, 40% and maybe take the quality down to say 65% and get it to 284. So if I have a goal for myself that I want this to be under 200K, like say I'm putting a bunch of images into a Pages document and if the images are too big the Pages document will be too big and the resulting pdf may be too big so maybe I set myself a goal of 200K for each of my images. So let's bring this down to 60% here and maybe 35% in scale and I get just under that. Then I can name it something different here. I'll export here to the Desktop. Here's the file. You can see it's the advertised size there and if I use it in Quick Look you can see it's still a pretty decent quality there. It will be fine in my Pages document especially since it is going to be even smaller than this in that document. Making those changes in Pixelmator Pro, since I started with the Photos App, the changes, in other words the cropping that I did at the beginning saved back to my Photos Library.

Remember you can always go back to image and Revert to Original and get the original back in the Photos App.

Now I want to show you another quick way to do it using the Web Export in Pixelmator Pro. So select an image like this. Then I can do Image and Edit With and Pixelmator Pro. I go into here and I'm not going to change anything. I'm going to go just immediately to Export For Web or Shift Command E. This is a different interface here. It is meant for web developers. But you can use it for a quick export. So the first thing for cropping you can just draw and it creates what is called a slice. The idea is web developers can slice up this image into different portions. But you're just going to create one slice. You'll see it here. You'll see its exact size so you can adjust to adjust that size. You can also go here and set it to point.5 scaling. So now it's going to be half that size. So a little more than 1500 pixels here, for instance. Then you can set the export format, change the quality, I'll just do it at 50% like that, and then just go to Export. I'm going to name it something better and export this slice as a JPEG 50% 

and scale 50%. So here's that file. If I get info on it you can see it is pretty small there because it is only 1500 pixels across and if I look at it, it still looks pretty decent. To have more control just use the regular crop and then the regular export function. But it is kind of an expert quick way to do it. You can use Export to Web as well.

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.