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The always-useful Preview app has gained a number of new annotation tools in Yosemite. To access the new tools, click the Toolbox icon at the right of the toolbar, alongside the Search field. The tools are:

Sketch: The pen icon lets you roughly draw a shape, which will then be autocorrected to its nearest canonical shape — draw a circle around something, for example, and it’ll be converted to a perfect circle. A floating toolbar will appear briefly offering the chance to switch back to your rough sketch. Note that this tool replaces the ability to hand-draw circles and squares — although see the next item in this list.

New shapes: Yosemite lets you add stars and polygons to images or documents, in addition to straight-up rectangles and circles. Click the shapes icon and a dropdown list will appear. Shapes are now dropped onto the canvas and you can move them around by clicking and dragging. Blue handles on each allow resizing but note the smaller green handles on each, by which the shape or nature of the item can be adjusted — dragging the green handle on the polygon lets you adjust how many sides it has, for example, even allowing you to create triangles.

Shaded mask: At the bottom left of the shapes dropdown list that appears when you click the shapes icon on the toolbar is the new mask tool. It lets you define an area of the image for highlighting. It does this by making the rest of the image shaded. This is confusingly similar to the Crop tool on some image editors, but totally unrelated.

Loupe: If you need to magnify an area of the image to show detail, you can place a loupe at that spot. This tool lives the bottom right of the shapes dropdown list, as mentioned above. You can place loupes over the top of each other to further magnify the image. Again, it might seem this is simply a magnifying tool offered by Preview to help with editing, but each loupe you place is saved-out with the image, and other items can be placed over the top of them.

The new tools in Preview are actually part of Yosemite’s Markup feature, featured prominently within Mail and used to annotate attachments (click the arrow at the top right of any image/PDF mail attachment). In actuality, however, Markup is available system-wide, and not just in Mail. This can be demonstrated by adding a picture to a TextEdit or Stickies document — the same Markup option will appear at the top right of the image (although curiously the Notes app is an exception to this rule).