The one thing that I’m still smug about to this day, being a smug Mac owner, is the fact that out of the box, Macs come with a program that can handle PDF’s, pictures and a whole load of other formats – Preview. There’s no need to go and download a program from Adobe to do this. What most people miss though is that Preview is quite a robust program, and rather than just being a ‘viewer’ program, it can handle a number of tasks.

Take the picture above. Believe it or not these are the actual Macstarter website headers I designed (aren’t you glad I didn’t use any of these?). I opened up this picture in Preview. At that point, I could have “Save As” or “Export” to save the picture as a different format, such as jpg, gif, tiff, or PDF. This useful for those times you need a picture in a specific format.

But one of the features in Snow Leopard and Lion is the fact that you can add labels, annotations, and shapes to PDF Files and image files in Preview.  You can open up any image, and then go to the Tools menu. From there you will select “Annotate”.

In the following menu, you’ll see all the choices in Lion’s preview. Snow Leopard has fewer options.

You’ll notice in Lion you have the option of now adding Speech and thought bubbles, as well as stylised text. Now, if you want to get into annotating text and really good looking labels, you can of course opt for something like Skitch or Comic Life. Those two programs are more than worth the small amount of money you pay for them. But for something quick and easy, (and I suppose a little less fun than Skitch or Comic Life) you can rely on Preview.