10 Uses For the Copy Subject Function In macOS

The Copy Subject tool in macOS lets you lift the subject from the background of a photo or remove the background and leave the subject. You can use this to do a variety of things like make social media profile pictures, Contacts images, iMovie overlays, better presentation backgrounds and more.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some uses for the Copy Subject feature in macOS Ventura.
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The ability to copy the subject out of a photo in macOS Ventura can be incredibly handy in a variety of different situations. Let's start with a simple example. Let's say you wanted to send a picture of someone or something in a message. Well, you can do it without the background by simply going to the photo in your Photos App. Then you're going to Control Click, two-finger click on the trackpad or right click on the mouse, and come up with Context Menu. You should see Copy Subject appear there. You should see it highlighted in the background. You can see that glowing effect around it and you can select Copy Subject. 
Now you can simply switch to another app that accepts an image as pasted content. For instance in Messages I can simply Paste into the message here and you could see just the subject appears. You can use that in a variety of situations. For instance here maybe I want to show somebody a chair I want to buy. I can use Copy Subject. Grab the chair and then paste it into a message. Another use is being able to use somebody's photo in your Contacts without including the background. This is a little trickier because here I can certainly Control Click on this photo in the Photo's App. But when I go Copy Subject I just get that in the Clipboard now. Now when I go to the Contacts App there is no way for me to paste that in, unfortunately. So instead I'm going to launch Preview. In Preview I can go to File, New from Clipboard and I get a new image with just the subject there. As an added bonus I can now crop the photo. So I'm going to just drag and create a section here that I can crop. Then go to Tools and Crop or Command K. Now I can save this image even just temporarily. I'm just going to save it here to the Desktop. Now I can drag this into there and I can further adjust like that. Now I've got my Contact photo. 
It's a little easier to use with Freeform because you can Copy and Paste. So I'm going to Copy Subject from this photo here. Switch to Freeform and let's say I want to make an organizational chart and it would be nice to have pictures of everybody but I only have pictures that have all these different backgrounds. So now if I paste in here I get a picture that doesn't include the background and everything will look a little more uniform. I could even go in here and crop and only have part of the image. 
This is also handy for social media profile pictures. So if I use the Copy Subject here then I can open up a nice background in Preview. I can Paste over that. Then I could readjust and then crop like that. 
You saw before how you didn't actually have to have a person or a pet as the subject. Something like this chair which stands out in this image here can be used in Copy Subject. I'm going to grab that, go to Preview, and create something new from that subject there. Then I can save this and this could be useful as a product picture. Say if you wanted to post this chair on Ebay or something that you made on Etsy. You can get rid of the entire background really easily and just post that object. It might look better and allow you to eliminate other things that may have been in the picture. 
You can also use this to make presentations look better. See how I just have a regular photo here with a frame around it. Well it would look a lot better if it was just the subject to the photo and they blended in with the background. Now I could delete this photo here, go back to the Photos App, use Copy Subject, and then paste them in there and put it on the slides like that. But I could also just take care of this right in Keynote. Just select this image here and go to Format Image and there's a Remove Background button which does the same thing. It's using the same functionality. So now I end up with just the person there. Let's go and get rid of the frame and now I can enlarge it. Now there they are on the background.
You can also do this in Pages to make documents look better. So, for instance, I could have a regular image here in my document and it's just a rectangle and I could put a frame around it. But I could also go to Format image here and remove background or just use Copy Subject and paste that in and the default here for Format Arrange is to have automatic text wrapping. You can set that to Around and then it is going to kind of fit the shape of whatever it is you've got there. So you could have it wrap around like that. In the past Pages has had the ability to do this as long as the background is a pretty solid color. But now you can remove the background from almost any photo. 
You can also use this to make video thumbnails, say for YouTube. In fact this is how I do it. Now so far I've showed you how to use Copy Subject in the Photos App. But you can also use it in Quick Look. So I just have an image here. I'm going to select it in the Finder and press the Spacebar for Quick Look. When I Control Click I get Copy Subject. Now I can go here into another app. I'm using Pixelmator Pro here and Paste. There I am. So now I'll move myself to the front and I can even assign a border like that. Of course this works really well because I'm using a green screen. But it still works if I was just using a regular photo with things in the background. 
So when you Copy a subject it is not correct to say the background of that new image is white. It is actually not any color. It's transparent. So you've created a semi-transparent image and that's why when you paste it over another image you just see the subject. It doesn't paste a rectangle of color. That means you can use it as an overlay in iMovie. So I'm going to create a new document in Preview, like I did before, with just the subject. You can see the gray showing you that it is a transparent background. So I'm going to save that to the Desktop and it will save as a png to preserve that transparency. Now I can drag and drop that in here, into iMovie, and let's go and switch the cropping to simply Fit. Let's switch the overlay to Picture-In-Picture. Now I've got a semi-transparent overlay here that can appear over a video. 
Now in addition to being able to take the subject and put them on top of another background you can simply alter the photo by only changing what is in the background, not the subject. So, for instance, for this image here in photos I'm actually going to bring up the Context Menu, choose Edit With, and Edit With Preview. So what I'm going to do here is go to Tools and then Remove Background. Convert to png. Now Command C to Copy just the subject. Now I'm going to do Command Z to Undo. Go back to the original image. I'm going to bring up the Markup Tools here and then the Adjustment Tools. I'm going to adjust and I'm going to cut back the saturation to basically make it black and white. Change the Temperature here to kind of create this bluish wintery image here. Then I'm going to Paste, with Command V, the Subject back in. Now all I need to do is adjust to get the subject to be exactly where it was before. Now I've changed the background of the image while still having the subject in the original colors. Of course you can also do the opposite. 
So I hope this gives you some ideas of different things that you can do with the Copy Subject feature in Ventura. If you have other ideas I'd love to hear them in the Comments. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “10 Uses For the Copy Subject Function In macOS”

Juris Ozols

8 months ago

Gary - Really appreciate this. I "sort of" knew about Copy Subject but had never tried it out. Now you've motivated me to play around with it. Very useful - thank you.

Juris

Andreas W

A careful and precise, concise all-encompassing presentation of topics is rarely found on the Internet. You always succeed brilliantly in this with every topic. And so, once again, I was able to try something generally useful that I might not have stumbled upon otherwise. Many thanks for that!

Frank Scully

I copied a page using Firefox "screenshot" then "save full page"
i pasted into Notes and got a perfect copy. Much better quality than print to pdf. Thanks Gary

oops posted on wrong page

Pat J

7 months ago

I went through and tried this on many photos in my Photo app on my MacBook Pro which is running Ventura 13.1 and I never got that "Copy Subject" when I right-clicked. Any idea why it is missing from my menu? Thanks!

Figured it out! I was using the thumbnail and not the full photo. Oh my! It's been a long day! Thank you for this wonderful tip.

10 Uses For the Copy Subject Function In macOS

Comments: 6 Responses to “10 Uses For the Copy Subject Function In macOS”

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