10 Creative Ways To Use Markup In Photos

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at different ways that you can use Markup Tools with your photos in the Photos App.

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So in the Photos App when you go to edit a photo you can make adjustments, use filters, or Crop and Rotate the photo. But in addition to that you could also click here and access extensions added by apps that you install. I see a few Affinity Photo extensions, Pixelmator Pro, and Acorn. But even if you don't have any of those you're going to have this one. Markup. You'll see this Markup Tool is the same tool that you'll see in apps like Preview and Mail. You can use it to markup your photos in the Photos App as well. One thing you may want to use it for is to simply create a border around your photo. That may make it look a bit better if you share it online or print it out. You can click here to go to Shapes, select a rectangle shape, and simply drag the edges of the rectangle so they go to the edges of the photo. You can adjust the size of the line here. You can go here to adjust the color and also you've got this Artistic Style right here to create a different looking border. When you click Save Changes the border becomes part of the photo. But remember Photos is non-destructive. So you can always go to Edit and then Revert to Original.

Of course you can use Shapes for a lot more than just the border. You can go and add Arrows and Circles. So let's go in here and add a circle. We can take the circle and drag it to something. We can continue to work with the size here. The type of line. The color and place it wherever we want. We can have more than one circle as well. You also, of course, can use arrows and lines. So let's create an arrow here and instead of circle we have an arrow that points to the object that we want. 

There are a few other shapes here as well. Like Stars, for instance. You can add a star here. You've got these green dots. One will change the number of points and the other one you can drag to change the shape of the star. We can go here and put a color to fill the shape. We can get rid of the outline and just have a star like that. We can drag the corner to resize. You can zoom in. I'm going to use the trackpad to do that and work with the shapes a little easier because it's hard to select the center of the circle. You can use this for all sorts of interesting things. People like to add shapes, kind of like stickers, to their photos. If I hold the Option key down and drag it creates a copy right there. So I could very easily put a number of different stars, resize some of them, and change the colors to create effects that I've seen in other photos posted online. Something like that. I'm sure you can do a better job than me. 

Now note that you can put text inside of shapes. So the most obvious use for that is this little speech bubble here. You could position that where you want. There are green dots here for the length of the arm there and the shape of it. Then you can change its color if you want. Then just double click inside and start typing. You can change the font that you're using and the size right here. You can also center the text and create whatever you want. 

There is one other shape here I want to point out. This is called a Loop as in a little magnifier that you can put on the image. So you can position it where you want. The blue dot will change the size and the green dot will change the magnification. You can place it there and it's a way to zoom in and see a little bit more of your photo. It's a great way to zoom in or point out a part of the photo. You could see it will stay there. You could also have multiple loops on the same photo. 

Now you can also just add text to your photo. Just click right here and then you get this little text box. You can type what you want. Position it. Change its color right in here and then make it larger as well. Change the font to something else and then drag to position it. You can even rotate the text using a Trackpad. Two fingers on a trackpad and twist and you can rotate it a little bit. Instead of using the text box use a rectangle like that. Then the rectangle you can position and take up part of the image, like that, and then just like with the speech bubble you could type in here, like that. Or you could use a rounded rectangle and place it something like that. It depends what type of effect you want. 

But there's another way to use text as well. Just use regular text here but instead of typing regular letters use Control Command Space to bring up the Emoji & Special Character Viewer. Then choose an emoji character. You could think of these like stickers. You have all these different characters you can now add. Increase the font size a little bit so it's bigger. You can even rotate it using the trackpad there. You could also go here to where the line shadow is and this effects text as well. So you can add a bit of a shadow to it. Then you can place fun stickers all over it. In addition to all the emoji that you are familiar with there's also a complete set of flags as part of the emoji set. Which means you could label your travel pictures with flags of the countries you're visiting.

Now drawing on photos is something people have done since before we had photos on computers. You see a lot of this online as well. So you could use these drawing tools right here. Be sure to set a color first. So we'll just draw with white right here. This one draws kind of like an ink pen. It gets thicker the more you draw. Notice how we get the drop shadow here because we still have the shadow turned on. You can set the thickness of the line right there. So let's draw with this right here which will create a line that stays the same thickness. You can do all sorts of interesting things. I've seen people outline subjects in photos like this. When you're finished drawing notice it tries to snap to a shape. You can click here to tell it, no you want the actual thing that you drew. Then you could, after the fact, go in and edit the line and the color. I'm horrible at drawing but I'm sure you can do a much better job. You could choose a thicker line or even this kind of line right here. Draw using that and then sometimes I've seen people draw over the subject with this. You can go in here, go to Show Colors and it brings up the Color Picker. You could change the transparency here. Let's make this semi-transparent which leads to all sorts of different interesting effects that you could do. 

Now a variation on that is to use this button here to allow you to draw using your iPhone or iPad. This is particularly useful if you've got an iPad with an Apple Pencil. As an example I'm going to use this iPhone right here. I'm going to select it and instantly I'm going to see the photo appear here on my iPhone. I could turn it on its side and make it a little easier to use the tools. Everything I do here I'm going to see on my Mac in real time. So I'm going to draw here and use all sorts of different tools and you could do basically the same thing. It's just a lot easier to do it using your finger or your Apple Pencil than to do it on your Mac's screen. Then I could just tap Done here on my iPhone and I've got those changes.

Here's one final idea for you that's a little different than the rest. You can use Markup to tint your photos to a certain color. Now you could go here into the Color Adjustment tools and change the cast, vibrance, do other things to try to kind of get the color that you want. But with Markup Tools you can just simply put that color on top as a rectangle. So what we'll do first is create a rectangle. Place it here. Let's set the border to Nothing. Let's set the color we want to use to the Fill color for the rectangle. Let's have it cover the entire thing. Then we'll go back to Color here and choose Show Colors. I'm going to make it semi-transparent. You could see the image show through. So I can give a slight color tint to everything using this. Then I can go and change the color and tint it to anything that I want. So you can see here's the result with a strong blue tint. Here's the original. I can follow that up with a little bit of brightness and more exposure there to restore some of the brightness that is being covered up by the rectangle there.

So there's some ideas for using the Markup Tool in the Photos App to do creative things with your photos. Remember you can combine any of these as much as you want. So you could add some arrows, a loop, tint the color, add a border, and add a caption all to the same photo.

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.