The Basics Of Editing in The Photos App On Your Mac

The Photos app on your Mac has a set of adjustment and editing tools. Get familiar with how these work by experimenting with them.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you the basics of editing your photos in the Mac Photos App.
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So a lot of people use the Photos app to store their photos. But there's also a great set of editing tools inside of the app that some people don't use. Let me show you the basics so you can get some use out of it. So to edit in Photos all you need to do is go to the individual photo you want, like this one, and then click the Edit button here at the upper right. Once you're in there you'll see all the different editing tools. At the top you'll see Adjust, Filters, and Crop. Let's start with Crop.
To crop a photo you can grab any corner and drag it inward to crop. If you release and wait then the photo will readjust. The portion that you just cropped out isn't gone. So, for instance, if I cropped to a size that I want like this and then wait and then I can click and drag and move this around. At any time I can simply Reset to reset the cropping and start again. Now in addition to doing that you can also rotate here using this little dial. So I'm going to click and drag up and down here to rotate. Let me get it so it's perfect.
Now on the right side you'll find some controls here. If you don't want to stick with the basic original ratio you can switch to another one. For instance you can go to Square, 16 x 9, 4 x 3, or Custom and enter in your own numbers. You can also keep this ratio but switch to a vertical look instead of horizontal.
Next let's go to Adjust. Now you have a bunch of controls here on the right. Each one of them has a little auto button. So if I want to auto adjust the light I can click here and it will look at the photo and try to make adjustments automatically. Once I've made adjustments to any one of these you'll see a checkmark next to it. I could click that to uncheck it to go back to the original and click it to check it to go back to my settings. I can also hit this Undo button here to revert back to the original settings.
Now if you want to adjust everything all at once you have this button here at the top. This will auto enhance everything. You could see in this case it could change the light and the color. You could see the checkmarks there. Click that again to turn that off. Each one of these expands when you click the Reveal triangle. So I could expand Light here and I get a little line that I can drag back and forth to adjust the light. So if you find something that you like here you can just leave it there. If you want to revert back to the center position you don't have to struggle with finding the exact middle. Just double click and it automatically goes to the middle.
Also some of these you can go and expand further under Options. Now it shows me all of the different settings. So if I chose Auto I can see, for instance, this is how it sets everything. I can revert back there and I can make my own changes. I like to adjust the highlights and the shadows to make the picture look more like I remember it looking like with my own eye.
Now anytime you're making these adjustments you can always click this button here and hold it to see the original and then release it to see the image with all of the changes that you've made. You can compare back and forth easily. You can also revert to original any time. Editing in the Photos app is nondestructive. So I can use that Revert to Original button much later. I can finish editing and come back days later, months later, years later and click the Revert of Original to go back to the original photo.
Now let's look at adjusting color. I can go and expand that and then go back and forth to make the colors more vivid or less. I can expand Options here and then adjust Saturation, Contrast, and Cast on my own. Or I can click on the Auto button to make automatic adjustments for those. You can use Retouch to get rid of blemishes in the photo. It helps some to zoom in. You can use this control up here to zoom in. Get to a portion of the photo where's there a blemish. Then you can adjust the size of the circle for correcting blemishes. Then move over the blemish and draw over it like that. You can see how it removes different blemishes.
You can use white balance to correct the lighting for the photo to make things like skin tone look normal. So I can use the auto adjustment here and you can see how it made my skin look a little different there. I can also go and just click on Skin Tone here, click on the Eyedropper tool, select some skin and it will make an adjustment there.
Noise reduction is another useful tool. If we zoom in here we can see the noise in the photo. Now watch what happens if I use noise reduction. You can see it smooths things over quite a bit. So basically it just blurs out some of these imperfections. Now if you want to get a little artistic with your photo you can go to Filters and there's a small set of filters that you can use. So you can choose, for instance, vivid, vivid warm, vivid cool, dramatic, dramatic warm, dramatic cool, and several different gray scale options.
Now when you have a photo taken using Portrait Mode on the iPhone when you go to Edit it you get some extra controls under Adjust. They don't appear on the right but they appear at the bottom. So you have Portrait Mode. You can turn that off. If you have it on you can choose the type of Portrait Mode you want and you can also have a control over here for the depth. So also if you have a live photo taken with an iPhone you can move your cursor over the little Live icon there at the top left to see the video portion of it. You can also go to Edit. Then at the bottom here you can turn off Live photos for that one and you can readjust to pick a new part of that to make as the key photo. You can click here to change from Normal to Looping to Bouncing meaning it goes forward and then reversed over and over again. Or Long Exposure which blends all of them together in an intelligent way to create some stunning effects like this.
So there are the basics. If you want to get good at it the deal it to practice. So you can always revert a photo back to its original. So go into some of your favorite photos and play around with all of these settings. It's a good time to do it now and then when you need to actually edit a photo quickly you kind of get the idea and know where to go to get the result that you want.

Comments: 8 Responses to “The Basics Of Editing in The Photos App On Your Mac”

Fred Kelsey

5 years ago

Your review of Photo's editing capabilities is great! In iPhoto I could bring up to different but very similar photos for comparison of which one I wanted to use. Is there a way to do this in Photos?

Gary Rosenzweig

If those photos were taken at the same time, then they should be right next to each other in All Photos. Just look at them there. Enlarge the thumbnails as big as you want.

James M. Shrouds

Excellent video. On my live view shots I don't see the Live view icon in the upper left hand corner when I open it in Photos. I also don't see the Live, Loop, Bounce, and Long Exposure selections on the bottom right. I am currently using MacOS High Sierra, do I need a more up todate operating system for these functions to work? If not, any other suggestions? Would love to see videos on advanced editing in the Photos App.

James: I think that is the case. I'm not sure when those features were added, but High Sierra is 2 versions back so I wouldn't expect to have it there.

Sandy M.

Thanks for the great video, Gary - I learned a lot of new tips. Is there a way I can save this to my Pinterest folder so I can go back and look at it? I couldn't figure it out, if there is a way. Thanks!

Sandy: Anything you create in Photos you can drag and drop to a website like Pinterest to upload the photo there.

k.kurts

4 years ago

How can you add filters like watercolor, sketch, infrared and other special effects like those to the Photos App? Or what software can you purchase to do that?

k.kurts: You'd need an external editor for things like that. You've got a whole range from free ones like SeaShore all the way up to Photoshop. There is a lot in the middle: Pixelmator, Acorn, Affinity Photo. I'd take the time to look at those and see which one may fit your needs.

Comments Closed.

The Basics Of Editing in The Photos App On Your Mac

Comments: 8 Responses to “The Basics Of Editing in The Photos App On Your Mac”

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