A small rookie problem to do with saving....please help - I have nice hair and I don't want to pull it all out!

[Ruth]

Hi all,

Hope you are great!

I will do my best to make my issue clear...

I create line are from photos at 6 inches wide by 9 inches tall and at 600 dpi. Great. So far so good.

When I save it (no matter what format - pdf, tiff, png...), the image on my desktop shrinks down all tiny.

When I open that saved image in Finder, the box that you'd use to drag the file (to increase or decrease the size) is now super far away from the perimeter of the picture. When I drag it to make it bigger it works, but when I save it again, the new saved file reverts back to it's tiny original.

The problem is that when I insert the picture into Pages, I can't manipulate it properly to fit because of that box being so far away from the picture.
I tried just 'sending it to the back', but that didn't work either.

Does that make sense? I'm sorry I'm short on the correct terminology.

If anyone can help, my hair and I would appreciate it

[Andrius]

Hey Ruth, I'm not too sure what could be going on, but could you share a screenshot of what, for example, Pages looks like with your pictures added to a document? That should help me get a better idea of what's happening...

[Ruth]

Hi Andrius,

Thank you for reaching out! Here is a screen shot of what it looks like in pixelmator on the left, and when it opens in Finder after I've saved it to the desktop is on the right.

[Andrius]

Thanks a lot for that, Ruth! From the screenshot, it looks like there's a lot of transparent space around the image. In Pixelmator, that's displayed as the checkerboard pattern. In Preview, that space is shown as white (at least in PDF files).

One quick solution would be to choose Image > Trim Canvas (from the Image menu at the top of your screen) and click OK to trim away all the transparent pixels. However, that would leave no edges around the image and you might not want that. You could also use Image > Canvas Size to reduce the size of the image without changing the size of its contents.

Also, is there any reason you're exporting the image to PDF? If you want to keep transparency, PNG is the safer option.

[Ruth]

Andrius.... You are my favourite person right now! Thank you so very much!

It was the trim canvas that saved the day.

The PDF image I'd shown in the photo, was one I picked at random as I had already tried saving in all other formats - including PNG - with all the same tine results.

But now you've made my day and I truly appreciate it.