A Preview Postscript
Some of the applications in OS X work so well that you might not need to buy any of the alternatives. For lightweight word processing, TextEdit might be all you ever need, and whatever Mail’s limitations, it has proven to be a useful and reliable e-mail client for many Mac users. But is Preview a Photoshop-killer? Unfortunately no; although Preview is certainly a Swiss Army knife program in some ways, it simply cannot compete with the bulging toolbox that is Photoshop.
Let’s review what Preview does well. It opens up practically every image file you’ll encounter and can convert those files to a nice variety of formats. It takes advantage of OS X technologies such as Spotlight and ColorSync. Preview can also be used to rotate, flip, and crop images as required.
On the other hand, its color correction tools are limited; and fudging aside, there’s no easy and reliable way to resize images. So although Preview is easily up to the task of processing images for attaching to e-mails or pasting into a newsletter (run up in TextEdit, of course) it will not replace Photoshop any time soon.