7 Steps To Edit Your Photos In the Mac Photos App

There are a lot of adjustments you can make to photos in the Mac Photos app, but to get started learn these 7 simple steps.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to edit a photo in the Mac Photos App in seven steps.
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Now after you've taken some photos and they're in your Photos Library editing them can be intimidating with all of the different controls and functions in the Mac Photos App. But you can improve your photos a great deal by just following some simple steps. The first thing you may want to do is rotate your photo slightly. For instance, let's look at this photo here. When I took this photo obviously I wasn't holding the camera very level. You could see the line of the ocean there isn't straight at all. If I go into Edit and then go to Crop I could adjust Rotation. Now there's a button at the bottom right hand corner for Auto-Adjust. You can try that first. Sometimes it will automatically try to adjust the rotation of the photo. But if that doesn't work you can grab this control here and rotate. Notice the lines that appear on the photo when you do this. They help you line it up. Now I can pretty easily line it up so that the horizon is perfectly level. It improves the photo a great deal. 
The next thing you may want to do is Crop your photo. You could make a photo a lot better by cropping out things around the edges. So go into Edit and then Crop just as before. But now use the corners and crop things out. I've got too much here at the bottom so I'm going to take some of that away because it's taking away focus from the subjects here. In addition there's too much over here that's not as interesting. I'm going to do this. Using the rule of thirds this photo is still far from perfect but it is a lot better than the original. 
The next thing you may want to do is cleanup imperfections. Usually you may want to do this when it comes to people and their skins but I always like to use the example of flowers. There could be imperfections like these dots here that I could get rid of by using the Retouch Tool. You can look at the Retouch Tool right here and change the size of the brush, something that fits the size of what it is you're going to be editing. You can zoom in and continue to adjust the size. When you get it to about there you could simply click right in that spot and it will adjust and try to get rid of those blemishes. You could also drag to fix an area. 
You could even do some extreme things. Here in this photo it looks great except there's a No Trespassing sign that I would love to get rid of. So I could use the Retouch Tool on this sign here. If I click it here to activate it you could see this is too small. Let's adjust the brush size to something bigger like this. Now I'm going to drag down to see if I can get rid of the entire sign. Sure enough it does. This area is far from perfect but zoomed out I'm not really going to notice it. At least not as much as the imperfection of having the No Trespassing sign on this beautiful scene. 
Now you want to work with the lighting and color in the photo. One thing you could do if nothing else it to use the Auto button that's right here. As a matter of fact you don't even have to be in Editing mode to use it. Just click it and it will try to automatically adjust the photo. This may not give you the perfect result but very often it's better than what you started with. You can turn it off there to compare. Also you can go into Edit and do it here. Now whether you turn this On or not the next step may be to adjust lighting. There's an Auto button here for lighting as well. So if you're not using the general enhancements there you can just Auto Enhance only the lighting and it won't touch the other things. Or you can Reveal the elements here under lighting. You could actually get more detail under Options here. But if you'd rather not go into the fine details like that just use this line here. Notice if I go to the right it's greatly enhancing the light, making things brighter. If I go here it's making things darker. You've got an Undo button right here. So ask yourself, in this photo does it look lighter or darker than I originally remember it when I took the photo. If it looks a little darker then adjust to the right to brighten things up. You could see how it changes all these things here. It's looking at the photo and it's just seeing these things according to what's being shown in the photo. So this is going to look different when you try it with your photos.
Next, do the same thing with color. You've got an Auto control here or you can reveal this and Options and just use this control here. If you remember the colors being more vivid when you took the photo drag to the right. If you think that the colors are a little too vivid in the photo and you kind of want to desaturate it you could bring it down to the left. Don't be afraid to play around with it because remember you can always Undo things. You can always Revert to the original. If you get really far down into adjusting things and you want to see how it compares to the original photo you always have this button here. Click and hold. You see the original. Release and you see the photo with all of your changes. Don't be afraid to Revert and start again adjusting the light and adjusting the color. Play around with the photo and see what you come up with. 
If you've taken a bunch of photos at the same location and you like how this looks you can always go to Image and then Copy Adjustments. Then you can go to another photo and then Edit that photo and go to Image, and then Paste Adjustments to use exactly the same adjustments for that photo. 
So the last thing you may want to do is try some of the Filters. Go to Filters here. 90% of the time I find I just want to stick with the original. But it's worth checking out some of these other filters to see your photo in a different way. Sometimes the results are great. Let's try some of these. You could see that doesn't work. It's way too vivid. But I can always adjust it down and maybe only have this at 43%. You could try this here, or this. Go through all of these to get different looks. In this case I don't like any of those. I'm going to stick with the original and that's fine. But when it comes to this photo, when I go to Filters, if I checkout the Vivid Cool version it looks pretty neat. But the sun is pretty washed out. But then Dramatic Cool is a lot better. 
So there are tons of other things you could do and ways to adjust your photo. But don't let the fact that you have so many choices get in the way with making small changes just using the Auto Enhance tool, basic light and color adjustments, some cropping, rotation, and other things. Try not to get frustrated the first few times you try this. It takes some practice to get used to this. Eventually you'll find you can do it faster and get even better results. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “7 Steps To Edit Your Photos In the Mac Photos App”

Razvan Mihai

3 years ago

Gary: Thank you for yet another just-in-time tutorial. I have noticed that Photos offers extensions for publishing photo albums.
I thought now was a good time to look back and have tangible memories in my hands.

I am not sure, however, how to go about changing a bunch of photos, and at the same time keeping the original ones just in case.

I was thinking of creating an album within the Photos app, but I am afraid any changes will alter the original raw photos. Any recommendations?

Gary Rosenzweig

Razvan: Photos editing is non-destructive. You will always have the "Revert To Original" option.

Mark Holmes

Gary, when you title a photo and/or add a caption and then share that photo, does the title and caption go along with the picture so that the person on the other end can see it?

Mark: Depends on which of the many methods you are using for sharing. Why not just try it and see?

Gene

I like how you set up the basics. I have a new iPhone 13 Pro and plan to start taking more photos. I am seeing all of the tools available in Photos. Thanks for sharing.

Comments Closed.

7 Steps To Edit Your Photos In the Mac Photos App

Comments: 5 Responses to “7 Steps To Edit Your Photos In the Mac Photos App”

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