Creating PDF’s is essential in design work, especially for print. For the longest time I’d used Photoshop’s built-in “PDF Presentation” feature to create multi-page PDF’s from several images. In fact, I wrote up a how-to of this feature almost exactly two years ago on my old tech tips blog, Greasy PC.

Well, much to my chagrin this feature essentially disappeared in Photoshop CS4 (at least it stopped being so intuitive). I was so attached to the previous workflow that I kept CS3 still installed just for this purpose (it came in handy when assembling the PDF’s for Who are You People).

Well, turns out there’s a dead simple way of doing this in OSX’s on Preview app. Here’s how:

1) In Finder, select all your images, and right click>Open With>Preview. Preview will open most graphic files, including Photoshop files!

2) In Preview, expand the Sidebar so you can see all the different open images. Drag and Drop to confirm the proper order, and then Select All the images (cmd-A)

3) And then, click File> Print Selected Images. The print dialog comes up, at which point click on the PDF dropdown, and select “Save as PDF.”

Name your file, and you’re done!

Note of course that this doesn’t give you nearly as much control as Photoshop CS3 or other dedicated PDF applications when it comes to the compression of the PDF… it really just creates a PDF of pretty much equal quality as the source images. So if you have a bunch of giant TIFFs that you need to make a web-ready PDF of, this is not the workflow for you. But if you just need to create something quick to show a client or to print yourself, this saves you having to open an exotic 3rd party app.