10 Simple Ways To Improve a Photo in the Mac Photos App

You don't need to be an expert at photo adjustment controls to make your photos look a little better. By just using a few of the basic tools, including some that are a single click, you can improve your photos.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some quick and simple ways that you can improve your photos in the Mac Photos App. 
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Once you have a photo in the Photos App on your Mac there are a ton of different ways that you can alter the image. But you don't have to adjust a whole bunch of different things just to improve your photos. In fact a lot can be done with just a single click. 
So let's start off with the obvious one. You can use the button here, which is called Auto Enhance. If you click that it's going to try to apply a bunch of different changes as best it can to try to make the photo look better. So I'm going to try it here and you can see it brightens the photo up. It has a lot more contrast. It definitely looks better than it did before. I'm going to use Command Z, for Edit Undo, to undo and you can see that's what it looked like before. Then I'm going to click the button again and you can see the changes. 
Now just like with everything else I'm going to show you here, just because the button is supposed to make the photo look better doesn't mean it actually looks better to you. So with every one of these it's important to try it, decide whether you like the original or you like the new one with the changes. You can always Undo the change. As a matter of fact if you go into Edit there is a Revert To Original button. So all the changes you make are nondestructive. 
Most of the tools you need to use are deeper than just this one button here. You need to click the Edit button to go to all the editing tools. You've got three sets of tools. Adjust, Filters, and Crop. So the first one I want to show you here is under Crop. It's not actually cropping the photo but straightening it, or you may think of it as rotating it. Straighten is the same thing as Rotate. If I move that line to the right or to the left you can see how it rotates it. It also gives me the grid lines there. So I can easily try to straighten a photo, say to match the horizon, or the floor or ceiling in a room. In this case I've got the water. If I set it to the original you can see that it is not level. That's because I'm sitting in a kayak when I took this. But with a little bit of adjustment, using those lines there, I can get it more or less even so that the water and the line below it are basically at the same level. So now I've straightened the photo. It was a quick and simple change and now I think the photo looks a lot better. 
But of course you can also use the Crop Tool and obviously you want to crop things out of the image that you don't want. But even an image like this can benefit from some cropping. So I'll go to Edit and then Crop here. The way to crop is to grab any of these corners to crop out some of the edges. Now notice when I do that I get this grid. It is basically giving me a chance to use the rule of thirds. The idea here is that in this grid I want to try to put objects of interest at the intersection of those lines. So, for instance, right here might be a decent place to put this. But let's try this one and I already don't like that because the bird is facing now away from the center of the photo. But if I use this one and then I wait for it to expand like it did there I can always go back and grab these edges and drag them back out. I do like this one because it kind of balances things out. It puts the bird there at one of those intersections and it has lots of other interesting things in the photo. It's nicely framed. So I think this is an improvement over the original photo. But again, like with all the rest of this, if you don't think it is an improvement simple don't use it. These are all things to try. Just because they are there doesn't mean they are always going to make the photo look better. 
Another section under Edit is Filters. Filters are great for setting a mood. So you've got a photo like this and here's the original. I can use Vivid or Vivid Warm, Vivid Cool, Dramatic, Dramatic Warm or Dramatic Cool. The rest of these are black and white ones and probably not ideal for this particular photo. But each of these kind of conveys a slightly different mood. Sometimes if you've got a good photo but you want to make it even better, you may want to try one of these. Note you can actually adjust how much the effect is applied. See this little meter here. You can drag it in so you can have it be Dramatic Warm but only half the effect instead of all the effect. 
Now let's start talking about adjusting brightness and colors. If I go to Edit here and then I stick with the Adjustment Tools there are a ton of different tools here. Each of these expand and then expands even more. So it can get kind of overwhelming. But you can easily use some of these Auto buttons to do things. So White Balance is one of the things where you can just click Auto. What White Balance tries to do is to make the photo look more realistic and just clicking the Auto it is worth doing especially with a photo like this. Where the colors look a little bit too vivid, maybe things are a bit off. If I click Auto here it does an adjustment and now for this photo it kind of looks more real to me. So if you try this and you think it is good you keep it. If not you can use the Undo button here. Click that and you'll go back to the original. 
When you go to Edit in a photo the first section in here is Light. You can click the Auto button there. It will auto adjust the light. Notice you've got this button here at the upper left hand corner. If you click and Hold that it will show you the original and then you release and it shows you the new version. So you can really quickly switch between these to see which one you like better. Now in addition to Auto here there is also, under Light and under Options, Brilliance. I find the moving Brilliance up sometimes can really make a photo look a lot better. Now maybe if this is a vacation photo of you and your family this isn't what you're going for. But if you're trying to post this online and grab people's attentions, either in an instagram post or as a You Tube Thumbnail or something like that, then moving Brilliance up can be a quick and simple way to achieve that. 
Now shadows are always a problem when taking photos. The sun is not always shining in the right direction. However you can lessen that effect if you go into Light. Under Options you've got Highlights & Shadows. These are kind of opposites. So with Shadows I can make the shaded parts brighter. So watch what happens when I adjust that up. You can see this area here, that's got the shadow, gets brighter. Just going to .5 up and then taking the highlights, the lightest parts of the photo, and bringing that down .5 and then bringing brightest up .5 to kind of compensate for the fact you brought down the highlights, of course the shadow is still there but the effect is less. Let's go and toggle this back and forth and you can see how dark that shadow looks here compared to now. So the shadow is still there but I saved the photo of it by bringing some of the light out of the shadowy areas more. You can see a lot more detail in my face in the shadow areas with these settings. 
Let's talk about adjusting Color. The reason I took this photo in the first place was because I thought the leaves look very bright green against the white background. But the photo really doesn't show that. However, I can make it look more like I remember by adjusting color. So I want to go into the Color Settings here. I can go into Options but instead of that I'm just going to use this big adjustment here that will adjust all the color and move it to the right. Now if I move it all the way to the right it's going to make the colors ridiculous. You can see how it is even bringing out some of the yellows in the wall. But if I move it just a bit to the right I can get that green to pop out. It even did a good job adding some color here to the trunk of the tree as you can see when you compare it. You can go into Options if you really want and adjust the Saturation even more.
Now let's talk about Retouching photos. A lot of time you do this on people to get rid of blemishes on their skin. But it could work in other situations as well. For instance here's a picture of an interesting looking door and it looks great except that right here is this kind of modern looking label. It would be nice to get rid of that and you can do that using the Retouch Tool here. I'm going to open this up and I'm going to click on this button, the little paint brush. Now we have this circle that I can use. Notice I can adjust the size of the circle. I want it to be just a little bit bigger than what it is I'm correcting. So I'm going to drag down with this to cover that area and then release. It is going to try to get rid of what was there and replace it with a similar texture. Now you can see how nice of a job it did getting rid of that blemish on this old door. 
Finally, let's talk about a tool that I don't use much but some people like. It's Vignette. It's the last tool here under Adjustments. So you can open this up and you can use the Auto button here to start. It's going to set these to something. What it does is it darkens the corners, basically it creates a circle around the photo. A lot of people like it because it creates a more dramatic look. You can adjust the strength here. So I can see more obviously that it is there. The radius, the softness. If you think it makes your photos better you can keep it. But Vignette is not for everyone. 
So there are ten simple ways to adjust your photos in the Photos App to make them look a little bit better and you can, of course, get more into these. There are a ton of controls. You can become an expert in making your photos look good by adjusting everything about them. But if you're not doing anything to your photos now and you want them to look a little bit better it may be worth, sometimes, applying a few of these things to various photos when you think it makes sense. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “10 Simple Ways To Improve a Photo in the Mac Photos App”

su gould

11 months ago

Video that went through the choices step-by-step was marvelous. Have been so wrapped up in using Adobe Photoshop that I hadn't noticed how much improved Photos was on my Mac. This is much simpler. Thank you.

John Weiner

At 3:39 and the discussion following, concerning the same image; there are saturated 'highlights' around the nose and left (i. e. right as we observe it) cheek that look "bothersome" to me. Too much saturation...how to eliminate it?

Gary Rosenzweig

John: At 3:39? Not sure what you mean. If you have highlights you want to get rid of, try lowering "Highlights" like I mentioned. Also the other lighting controls.

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Ron Hunter

The more I learn about Photos (thanks Gary!) the more I'm tempted to leave Lightroom. Photos meets my needs for editing, but the organizational capability of Lightroom keeps me "straddling the fence".

Emme

Thank you for the tutorial on photos. It was great and I have learnt heaps

Soizic

Thanks for this video.
As you said, sometimes all the options for editing can be overwhelming!

RJP1

Great video full of useful tips! Does the Photos app allow you to make these changes to RAW images and JPEG both?
Thank you.

RJP1: Yes.