When you want to send a document as is, a PDF is the way to go. Adobe created the Portable Document Format to allow you to share manuals, forms, resumes, contracts, scanned material, pages from a book, eBooks and more to any device without changing its look or ruining the format.
Ever want to save a webpage to take a closer look later? You can take a screenshot or copy a text, but a better way is to save the page as a PDF on your PC or Mac. You can even eliminate ads while doing so. Tap or click here for instructions on saving a webpage as a PDF.
While PDFs are great for preserving documents as they’re meant to be, sometimes you’ll want to save just a part of one. You may want to take an image, graph or chart from a PDF to use elsewhere. We’ll show you how to do this on PC, Mac, iOS and Android.
Snipping Tool on PC
Windows 10 and 11 have a built-in tool that lets you take a screenshot of a portion of whatever you have displayed on the screen.
- Open the PDF you want to extract an image from.
- Press the Windows logo key + Shift + S or type snipping tool in search. The desktop will darken while you select an area for your screenshot.
- Rectangular mode is selected by default. You can change the shape of your snip by choosing one of the other options in the toolbar: Window mode, Full-screen mode, and Free-form mode.
- The screenshot is automatically copied to your clipboard. Select the notification that pops up for more editing options and to save it to your computer.
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Crop a PDF on Mac
You can crop a PDF in Preview mode on your Mac.
- Open the PDF you want to extract an image from.
- Click the Rectangular Selection button in the Markup toolbar. If it’s not showing up, click the Show Markup Toolbar button.
- Click and drag on the portion of the page you want to keep.
- Click the Crop button in the Markup toolbar.
Crop a screenshot on iOS
The easiest way to crop a portion of a PDF on your iPhone is to take a screenshot and then cut out what you want.
- Open a PDF on your iPhone and take a screenshot. You can do this by pressing the power button and volume up button at the same time.
- Launch the Photos app and open the screenshot of the PDF.
- Tap Edit, then tap the crop button.
- Tap and drag on the portion of the image you want to keep.
- Tap Done.
Crop a screenshot on Android
You can crop a portion of a PDF on your Android by taking a screenshot and then using the edit tools.
- Open a PDF on your Android and take a screenshot.
- After you take a screenshot, you’ll see an option to Edit the image. You can open the photo in Photos and tap on Edit from there.
- Tap Crop.
- Tap and drag on the portion of the image you want to keep.
- Tap Save.
Save images from Word Documents
You can extract images from Word Documents in just a few steps.
- Open the document in Microsoft Word.
- Right-click on the image you want to save and click Save as Picture.
- Select the file format that you want from the Save as list.
- Type a new name or keep the suggested name.
- Select the folder where you want to store the image.
- Click Save.
Save images from Google Docs
It’s easy to save an image from a document in Google Docs using the Save to Keep option.
- Open the document in Google Docs.
- Right-click the image and select Save to Keep.
- A sidebar will appear, where you can then right-click on the image and select Save image as…
- Save the image to your desired location.
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