How To Combine Parts Of Images Using Mac Photos

You can take the subject of one photo and copy it onto the background of another photo using just when comes with your Mac, without ever taking the photo out of your Photos library.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to combine images in the Photos App on your Mac. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/Patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 
So if you want to combine two images, like pick something out of the foreground like yourself from one and then put it onto the background of another image, you can do it with a variety of different apps. If you're skilled and have professional apps like PhotoShop or something similar of course you can do it there. But I'm going to show you how to do it with just what comes with your Mac. As a matter of fact keeping the photos in the Photos App the whole time. 
For instance let's start off with a photo like this. I'm going to take myself out of this photo and I'm going to put myself onto another photo to make it look like I was there. Now there are a few different ways to get yourself out of this photo. The simplest is to use the Copy Subject feature. This was something introduced to macOS Ventura and it's gotten better in Sonoma. To get to it what you need to do is Control Click, two-finger click, or right click on the image and then look for Copy Subject. Now this will only be active if your Mac can find a subject in the photo. So if it is a complex image where you blend in with the background it may not be able to do it. But you can use Copy Subject here and now you basically copied the subject to the photo. As a matter of fact look at it closely when I select Copy Subject you can see it highlights. It has this little line that glows around to show you what it is going to copy. So you can kind of get a preview of what it is going to copy there. It's not always going to be perfect and I'll show you ways that you can manually do it in a minute. 
But for now we're just going to copy the subject and then we're going to go back out to the Photos  and look for another photo to put this subject on top of. Let's choose this one here. Now, in order to paste the image on top of this one you'd think you would go to Edit here. But there is no way to actually edit layers and actually add a layer here in side of Photos. But that's okay because Photos has the ability to use external editors. If I go to Image and then Edit With you could see it shows me all the apps where I can edit this photo. 
Now a lot of these are things like, for instance, PhotoShop and the like. We're not going to use any of those. We're going to use what comes with your Mac. So it is built-in. It's the Preview App. I have it set as the Default here so if I just use Command and Enter it just goes here without me having to dig into the menus. When I open this image up in Preview any changes I make now in Preview will be reflected in the Photos App. So, all I'm going to do here is simply Paste. Since I copied the subject I've got this new layer here. You can even see it behind here in Photos showing that the change is there. I'm going to put this down here near the bottom and I'm going to make it a little bit larger. So I'm going to grab one of these blue dots here, like that, and get something like that. I'll position it where I want. I can see if I look underneath how it looks there in Photos. But not all apps will actually send information back to photos in real time like that. 
But regardless of what you're using if you Save it should send it back there and then at this point I can Close and now I've got this new version of the photo in Photos. So very easily I was able to add myself to this image. Now you can't Edit it once you've actually finished with it in Preview. If I were to go in and Edit With and choose Preview again this is no longer a separate layer. So I can't do anything with it. 
But you can easily start over if you didn't get the result you want because in Photos it's always nondestructive editing meaning you can always go to Image and Revert To Original and go back to the original photo and then try again. 
Now there are some variations on this. For instance if you weren't able to get what you wanted with Control Clicking and then using Copy Subject then you can always use the same function here, Image, Edit With, and Preview. Open this up in Preview but instead of editing the image use this as a way to get what's there. In Preview you can also Control Click, two-finger click, or right click and Copy Subject. That will get you the same thing. But you can also go to the Markup Tools here and then you can use either the Lasso Selection Tool and select whatever you want or you can use the Smart Lasso and then draw roughly around the subject there. I'm going to do it like this and then I'm going to go across and just get basically tracing the edges and then it will do a completely different function. More of a manual function there to try to copy the subject. Then I can do Command C there, close this without ever having made a change. So this is untouched. Now I can go into another photo and do the same thing that I did before, editing in Preview and Pasting what I copied and then having that image over this one here. 
So you've got an automatic and a manual way to get the subject. I do want to point out one more way. If you go in and then do the same thing where you Edit With and in Preview there's a function in addition to two-finger clicking here and choosing Copy Subject. You can go into Tools and then you can remove background. When you do that it's going to ask to convert to png, because it needs to be transparent, and it's going to kind of do the opposite. It's going to get rid of all of this, instead of copying just this. The advantage to this is you can now go into this image and you can use the Markup Tools, I'll just use the Lasso Selection, and I can select an area like this. Once I've selected it press the Delete Key and basically trim more off. So once I've got this trimmed like I want I can Copy it, Command C, Close. Now notice it did actually change this image here but no fear because I can just go and Revert To Original for this one and thenI can go into another image and now I'll edit this and paste in my modified version like that. 
Save. Now you can see how it has changed here in the Photos App. 
So you can see you can make it really easy just by using Copy Subject on one photo and then editing the other photo in Preview and pasting it in there. Or you can get more precise by bringing the first photo into Preview and using a variety of techniques to get exactly what you want before pasting it into the other. Either way all you need is Photos and Preview which come with your Mac and you never have to have the photo leave your Photos Library to do it. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 12 Responses to “How To Combine Parts Of Images Using Mac Photos”

Sheldon

11 months ago

Thanks bunches

nick

Thanks Gary, always amazed on the hidden functionalities in a Mac which you show us. If you get chance, would love to see a tutorial on making a collage in the Photos app where the edges of the photos are softly blended into each other. I know I can do that in Pixelmator but was wondering if it's possible with the Photos app. Thanks.

Rohit

Great Post, Thanks for showing details.

Gary Rosenzweig

Nick: For something like that, using Pixelmator is a good idea. You can also use Pages or Keynote for collages. See https://macmost.com/how-to-create-a-photo-collage-on-a-mac.html But there's really no way to blend edges in the Photos app.

Iain Houston

Gary. That’s really useful. Thanks. I find that I need the more sophisticated image editors less and less these days now that I understand how much more native Mac apps do than I previously knew.

Melody

Thanks for sharing such cool Mac tricks!

Trixie Walker

Really interesting topic, the only problem I have is although using Sonoma 14.4.1 on a 2020, 27", iMac, the photos app is quite different for some reason and doesn't have the copy subject feature. Any ideas why not would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Trixie: It should be there. So when you view an image and Control+click inside it, you don't see the option at all?

Thanks Gary for speedy reply, greatly appreciated as said above.
I've tried again with a slightly larger image to copy and it worked.
Now "playing" with it in preview!

Kathleen Difato

Super useful. I stopped using the native photos app ages ago for Lightroom. But now I’m rethinking it as Photos seems to have improved a lot.

Pam Williams

Does this also work in Catalina? I do not show the options in Preview or Photos.

Pam: No. This is new in Sonoma.