Live: Using Markup To Overlay Graphics On Your Photos

Hi, everyone.

This is Gary with another live episode of MacMost.

Today, I'm going to look at using the markup tools in the Photos app directly with your photos.

Okay, so this is something a lot of people don't know is there.

In the Photos app, you can, of course, edit and you can adjust, say, colors.

You can adjust, you know, the lighting, things like that.

You can crop, you can rotate, all sorts of stuff.

But you also have the ability to access kind of third-party tools that could add extensions to photos and edit directly in photos.

By default, there's one thing there that's not a third-party tool, and it's markup.

Markup is the set of tools that you see commonly in apps like Preview or in Mail or any place where you've got a PDF or image, and you can just edit it, usually adding like arrows or text or something like that to the image or PDF.

That's there as an extension to photos, which means you can use it to add things like text, arrows, all sorts of different things right there in the photos app.

You don't have to go to another app or anything like that.

And it's all non-destructive.

So you can make temporary changes, add things, and then revert back to your original.

You're never losing your original photo.

So let's take a look here.

I'm in the photos app and I've got a bunch of photos here.

Let's just pick one that we could use as kind of like an example here.

Let's do like this one right here.

So we're looking at this photo now and of course we can edit and the editing tools are adjust, filters, crop, and cleanup.

Under adjust you've got you know the ability to change lighting and color and all that filters or a few filters you could apply you could crop you could clean up or a retouch but you've also got this button here this is the key button right here and uh let me make my uh pointer a little bit bigger so you could more easily see what it is I'm doing throughout the tutorial.

And then I'll show you how you can.

There we go.

So make the pointer bigger and maybe give it a little bit more of a color there.

There.

Now you can see it.

And then you can see here, I'm clicking on this more button here click there and this is where you'll find third-party tools like for instance pixelmater pro that add things here sometimes they're simple like pixelmater pro just takes it into pixelmater pro you can always use edit width to do that but um other times other tools would do things like you know filters or brightness enhance all sorts of stuff you may end up with a whole list of things here markup is always there though because it's built into the system so it's kind of like you'll never end up with an empty menu here because markup is always going to be there.

You'd also use manage here and that'll take in system settings.

And you can, if like, maybe you have a tool that's supposed to be here, but it's not, you can turn it on and make sure it's in the list.

But we're just going to focus in this live tutorial here on markup.

I'm going to select markup there.

And now you go into, you see, I'm still in photos here.

You go into this mode here where I've just got the markup tools at the top.

Now the markup tools are funny things because they have different tools slightly in different situations.

Like you'll see different things when editing a PDF in preview, then an image in preview, then say an image in the mail app.

So here's the set of things you end up with markup in photos.

And even this set of things, there are a couple of things in here that don't actually work or don't kind of make sense.

But we're going to focus on the ones that do make sense.

And the first two here are, there's one called sketch and there's one called draw.

You could see if you hover over a button like this, You usually get a little, what's called a tool tip that tells you what it is.

I'm going to start with draw here and I can use draw and I could just draw on the image here.

So let's see, oh, I need to set a color here.

So this is the stroke or border color and this is the fill color.

For drawing, you need a stroke color.

I'm going to set it to red.

And now when I draw, I get red and I could just draw what I want and I can make multiple drawings and all of that.

It's interesting to note right at this point that you could do Command-Z for undo, just like you would expect, so it's easy to undo these things.

I can change this to another color here, like a green.

I also can go to the Line tool here and change the thickness of the line to make it thinner.

I could change whether there's a shadow or not.

You may have noticed there's a shadow there.

Let's draw like this, and there's no shadow now.

Once you've drawn, notice that if you move over the drawing, the cursor changes to a hand or the pointer, I should say, changes to a hand.

You could drag this around.

So you can have multiple objects here like that.

You could drag it around.

You could even grab the blue dots and resize the drawing.

So for instance, you wanted to use the drawing tool to point something out.

You could draw an arrow here and then you could grab it and move it around.

It's not a very good arrow.

You can add the shadow afterwards like that.

You can't change the thickness when you're doing draw, but you can't change the shadow.

You can do this.

You can also rotate.

You can rotate almost anything I'm going to show you here, but only if you have a trackpad.

You can't do it on a mouse.

So you need to use two fingers on a trackpad and you rotate like that.

So yeah, you get your basic drawing there and you could do all sorts of stuff with drawing.

I guess better if you know how to draw, which I don't, not very good at it, but you could do a thicker line here, draw, and you could outline something or circle something or whatever.

Quickly mark up your image with stuff.

Now there's also this sketch tool here, which is interesting because at first it appears to do the same thing here.

You use the same stroke color, use these same thickness things here.

you do have the ability to do dashes or kind of a like a rough line and you've got the shadow and you could draw just like before except when you're done do you have these options here and these options are to let you keep the exact drawing that you've got convert it to a shape that may look similar to what you draw you drew and sometimes convert it to a curve too depending about what you draw.

So for instance, if I wanted to circle something, I could use the sketch tool here, draws a rough circle.

It gets out, it's not perfect.

And when I stop, it changes to a perfect circle, but I had the option to click here to say, no, I want the rough circle that I drew.

So you have that, you could do it with lots of different things.

For instance, an arrow, I'm going to draw a rough arrow.

And when I release, it changes to a perfect arrow.

And I have the option to click here and switch back to the rough arrow if I want.

A rectangle, like that, you can see, perfect or the rough one.

An oval, a star, like that.

So, interesting.

I'm going to show you shapes in a second, but if you wanted to just draw a bunch of circles, for instance um you can you know do this like that now when you do get a shape like this not only do you have to worry about the border or stroke color but you have to worry about the fill so the fill for each thing is like you know a separate color you could set it to this little black uh square with the line through it that means nothing so now you've got like a circle that's got nothing in it and it remembers your choice so i can now draw a bunch of circles very quickly and easily like that without using the circle tool, which I'll show you in a minute.

That's in here.

So here you've got shapes and you don't have the full slate of shapes like you do when you're working pages or free form or something like that.

What you do is you've got basically eight different shapes here.

The first one is a line and you click on it, select it, it's going to give you a line and you've got your line there.

You've got two blue dots.

You can change where it starts, where it ends.

You've got the green dot so you could curve the line by dragging the green dot like that.

This is also affected by the line thickness.

You can do the dashed line there, the rough drawing there.

And you also can add an arrowhead to one end or the other end or both ends like that.

So you have all these different choices to make here to determine how it looks.

So if I wanted to say a, uh, let's do a orange line and make it thinner.

Um, I could draw like that.

And actually that was the draw tool, which is another thing.

You know, I showed you how like the shapes and all it knows the shapes.

So if you draw something that looks like a line, it's going to convert it to a line, even with the green dot.

But if you want a line, you select it there under shapes and then you position it where you want.

It's interesting to note that the arrow, the second shape, is the same thing as the line except that it's just starting you off with an arrow head at the other end.

So you could convert this very easily to a regular line just as you can convert the regular line to an arrow and then you can, you know, play around with this and place it.

It is interesting to note that you do not have to start from scratch each time.

So if I were to create like an arrow like this, let's adjust the thickness, let's change the color, and I like it, I could select it and command C to copy and command V to paste.

I could also just select it and option drag it.

When you option drag something in most graphics apps, it duplicates it.

So if I wanted a bunch of arrows, I can continue to option drag the arrow there to duplicate it, which makes it a lot faster if you need to mark up a lot of stuff.

So let's go here and take a look at some more shapes.

You've got the rectangle shape.

The rectangle shape has more blue dots because you've got sides and corners that you could drag.

It uses all the same stroke, color stuff, and thickness as before, but now you also have the fill like that.

so uh you could do lots of stuff with this you could make it a perfect square let's see if you option drag then you know it's dragging that in the opposite either corner or side if you shift drag it locks its uh it locks its ratio there so a rectangle like this if i shift drag it locks it to a square like that.

So if you want a perfect square, shift, drag, that.

And you also have a rounded rectangle, which unlike rounded rectangles and pages and all, you can't change the curve of the corner.

It's just a regular rectangle, but with the corners rounded, it's a little nicer.

You've got circle, which is actually an oval.

But again, if you shift, drag a corner, it locks to a circle and you could drag this and you could set the fill.

Now, I want to stop here and talk a little bit about the fill here.

Let's go and set the stroke to nothing.

So it's just fill.

And let's turn the shadow off, then a no drop shadow.

Now, it doesn't have to be solid.

If you look at the colors here and go to show colors, you get the full color picker, including opacity.

So you could set this to be semi-transparent like that, and then use things like the rectangle, the rounded rectangle circle, all the other shapes has a shady thing to like highlight something if you want so i can change this let's go here show colors and uh put it off screen there but i can drag it onto the screen show colors let's go here let's go to like more of a yellow let's i got to grab it show colors It's not cooperating, so grab this.

Oh, it's still changing my pointer to do that.

I still had that interface open.

That's why it's yellow all of a sudden.

So there we go.

I'll just change it back, and I will close system settings on my other screen.

So now I have a better time with this.

I can select this, and I can now do show colors with it.

now it's not behaving but the idea is you know i could change it to a yellow here and make the yellow semi-transparent so you know if i wanted to important it's a good way to highlight things to make like do a yellow do a red make it semi-transparent like i showed um you've got in addition to the circle square right a rectangle you've got this thing which is like a speech bubble but you can point stuff out so you can you can see the shape here let's make it something where we can see it more obviously like that you have in addition to the blue dots you've got these green dots here you can take this green dot and you can extend or shrink the area there the little triangle coming out of it and then you could grab the end of it so you could point to something and then with it pointed something you could have it uh with text in it because any of these shapes you can double click on it and you can have text in there so this is where we edit text we can change the text color and everything to that so this is handy for pointing out stuff for annotating something or you know if there's a person you can have them say something let's do that in fact let's cancel this and done and go here and do edit and then we'll go here to markup and then I could say use this speech bubble thing here let's make it bigger and let's have it like I'm talking.

I'll double click in here and say that.

And the speech bubble works you know with borders i could do a border an orange border like that um one of the things i like is that you can grab the green dot there for this the uh little extension if you make it like the smallest it can it becomes this line as long as you have a border so you can use it to point to stuff and label stuff with it it's kind of nice you also have star and a polygon there and then you've got green dots here and the green dots have the depth of the angles there but also you grab the other green dot and you can change the number of things here so you can have a little star or something you know in the corner or whatever and you can also you know make this empty and all that um you can have text inside of any of these shapes so i could do a rectangle there the fill and then i can have text inside of it so they act as kind of text fields polygon's the same thing you've got this green dot here and you can drag it to make it a triangle all the way up to like lots and lots of sides like that so you've got that so that's kind of cool but there are two other shapes here that i'll get to in a minute i want to first get to this one here which is a text field.

So I showed how you could just put text in a rectangle, circle, text bubble, all of that.

But you could also just have text by itself.

So, you know, you could type text like this.

And this is how you kind of add text, like a caption or something to a photo.

So the text here can also be, you know, a color like that and larger.

And you can let's left justify it like that.

Put it here.

I can use two fingers and rotate it a bit.

Should be able to.

See, it's not letting me do that.

There we go.

Two fingers and rotating.

So I can put it a little bit of an angle like that and drag it around and I can still go in.

Yeah, so you could do cool stuff like this.

It even, the shadow works with this as well.

You can put a slight shadow under it.

That's useful for text.

So yeah, drawing text is interesting.

It's cool.

You can do stuff like this.

You do it in a bubble.

You could do something simple.

Like if you wanted to put, just click here to draw text and say, you know, copyright, need, you know, whatever.

I put this at the bottom here and you know put it as a watermark kind of thing the color can even if you do show colors which still isn't going to work for me here for whatever reason because I was messing around with the system settings before to get the pointer color change that'll teach me to do something like that in the middle of a tutorial.

You could do a semi-transparent kind of thing.

Let's go ahead and see if I can bring that back up.

I think it would be good to demonstrate.

Let's see here.

If I use...

I've got this selected.

And if I go here...

nope still not going to bring up the color palette okay so you could do like imagine doing this as semi-transparent you know using the color wheel there setting the opacity like i showed earlier and then it's 50 then it's kind of blended in a bit you could also of course do like a rectangle like this and make that semi-transparent and then put you know the text in there as another option.

So yeah, so text boxes as opposed to having a rectangle that has text in it.

Now, you've also got some things here that don't quite work, like highlight selection is something for like PDFs and text.

I don't know why it's left in here in markup tools under photos.

And I've showed you all these other tools because this is how you change the stroke.

This is how you change the color for the fill.

And this is how you change everything for whatever text, whether it's a text box or text inside of a shape.

You've got your font, you've got your color, you've got your size, bold, italics, underline, and then whether as you add text to it, it's going to stay centered, left, right, or multi-line.

You could do it justified on both sides.

So you've got all of that.

you could do there's a cropping tool in here but the cropping tool doesn't make sense because you already have cropping inside of photos and that's what you should use it's also image description which i don't think would add anything to it here that's an accessibility feature and then there's this which allows you to actually draw using your ipad or iphone that's connected so you know your finger or your apple pencil on an ipad it would should take this over i'm not going to demonstrate it here but it should take it over to that device and allow you to use the drawing tools there to draw on it in a different way.

The two things I skipped over before were these two tools here.

This one is called the mask.

And if you select it, you notice you get a rectangle here.

And in the middle of the rectangle, it is, the image is normal.

Outside of the rectangle, the image is darkened.

And this is basically a way to highlight something.

You grab these blue dots, And then you change the shape and you have it appear over whatever it is you're trying to highlight.

You know, so not much here, but you could do something like that.

And that's what that, you know, kind of looks like.

If you want to drag it around, notice you have to drag around the outside.

Like you can't drag the hole.

You have to drag outside of it.

So it's a way to highlight something in a photo.

Could be useful for some people.

I will use the delete key to delete it.

this is more interesting it's called the loop and the loop puts this little circle here it's like a magnifying glass and then you can use the blue dot to expand the size and the green dot changes the magnification so you know it's probably more useful in other situations um let's find a photo where that might make more sense.

So something like, I don't know, a garden, but it would be better with a garden that actually had something that I wanted to point out.

So maybe not.

I don't know, here's a dragon, right? Let's go and edit this, go in here, markup, and let's say I wanted to add a loop because I'm trying to show off the eye here you know so I can do that and that's it you can't really change much else I don't think like the line size yeah the line size does change so you can like make the line bigger and I don't know if you change the line color yeah you can so you can make it more obvious where the lube is like that and you can do multiples of these so you can point out two separate things in two separate places or I imagine you could just option drag, you had to create a duplicate of this.

And then, you know, if something else, like point it out over here or whatever.

So that's kind of an interesting thing.

And then you could add, you know, if you had that, you could also add, say, some text or a text bubble or something to it, you know, or add an arrow.

Let's give this arrow a color like that, you know, to point to it, that kind of thing.

So the loop is really interesting.

I do want to point out a couple more things about this but first I wanted to briefly talk about that these videos are brought to you thanks to all of MacMost's great Patreon supporters so more than 2,000 people support MacMost at Patreon that's why the MacMost.com site has no ads on it the weekly newsletter that you can get is free and has no ads and it just tells you which videos and stuff I published all week that's all thanks to Patreon supporters that's the main way that MacMost is funded is through Patreon so if you're interested in that go check out macmost.com slash Patreon and it has more information there that you could read about and I'd appreciate if you just check it out and read it even if you don't think it's a good time for you to be able to help support MacMost so let's take a look at I think one of the most important features of all of this, and that is that it's non-destructive and it's editable.

So, for instance, here, remember we added this text here? Let's go in and edit and then go to markup again and notice it's still editable.

I can still change this.

So it's not the kind of thing where it's imprinted permanently on there.

And the arrows, text, stuff you add, all this markup stuff, You could go in and edit it again in markup tools.

That's really cool.

You can get rid of it all, you know, too, of course.

But in addition to that, you always have revert to original.

Here I'm in editing mode and I can do revert to original.

Or even, you know, with this image selected here, just like that, you can go image revert to original.

And that's for any of the adjustments.

So I adjusted color or cropping and rotated it.

I can do revert to original and it goes back to the original.

Photos always saves that original.

so it's important here that means you could do a lot more with this you don't have to select it and say uh you know duplicate there's a duplicate function in here which i remember where it is always can go here to find it duplicate one photo which is in the image menu just way down there it is duplicate one photo command d so you could like duplicate this and create one that has text and an arrow and all that and that might be fine if you think it's something you want to share all the time and go back and like you just want to have it here in messages it will actually make a copy of the of the photo but if you just want to do it as a one-time thing or export it to uh you know what's your uh you know a file or something like that um you can just revert when you're done oh i didn't mean to do pixel made or pro there but you get the idea uh markup and let's do text again let's do that same issue right here, select it, let's make it big, put it here, let's do like an arrow, make that sort of color we'll see, I don't know, just showing the direction of the path, and whatever else you want to do, drawing you know something like this like to outline things and collages and stuff um you know if i do save changes for this i know i can revert to it but i also can just you know instead of having a duplicate i could just temporarily share this now uh or temporarily export it so i can export one photo normally and um i will just export this to the desktop and there he is And you can see it has the markup all there.

As opposed to if I were to select that and go export unmodified original, that's going to take the original one, the original photo, and it will export it.

And of course, that doesn't include that.

That's the original, like from the camera photo.

So there's that.

So you don't have to duplicate it.

Now, the other thing I want to show you is that you can go further than this using a slightly different technique.

So instead of going to edit and then into the more button here under editing and choose markup as an extension, if you really wanted to, you could go to image and edit with, and then this allows you to edit with an external editor.

You can use Photoshop if you've got it.

You could use Pixelmator Pro if you've got it.

But if you're interested in the markup tools, you could use the preview app, which is built in the Mac OS.

And then it opens up this in the preview app.

And preview app, of course, includes markup tools, the same markup tools, but sometimes more.

Like for instance, you've got the instant alpha, you've got selections, you know, so I could take a selection like this, copy it, paste, and I've got it kind of a temporary layer there.

Lasso and smart lasso.

You've got, you know, basically the same shapes.

You've got the same text with the same options here, but you've got some other things.

You've got some adjustments here.

I don't know why you would use those because you've got better adjustments in photos, but you can take this into preview and then any changes you make.

Let's do that weird change where I just, I selected something.

Let's get the sign here, copy and paste.

And I put another copy of the sign here.

I don't know why I want to do that.

Maybe that's a flower and I want to put it here or whatever.

But if I save in preview and then close preview, you could see the changes apply just like it would be in Photoshop or Pixelmator Pro or any external editor.

So you have actually two ways to get to the markup tools using the extension button, that more button in editing and also using image and then edit with, which is the gateway to actually being able to edit an image from photos without having to export it and import or anything in any app you want, like Photoshop, like Pixelmator Pro, or like Acorn, like whatever you want.

So you've got multiple ways to get to these things.

And then that change, just like any other, can, you know, revert to original and you've got your original one back.

You could also, like an interesting thing to do here is you could go and say, let's go like here and say, image, edit width, preview, do your markup, like an arrow, like that.

And then you're still in preview.

So you can now at this point export.

Export this as something else, right? And then I could just undo here.

You know, I'm not going to make any change.

I could just close, no changes applied here.

And then, you know, it seemed it did change it.

It did do an auto save.

So, but I still can revert to original.

It was kind of an easier way maybe to export, maybe a better workflow.

So yeah, you've got a few different options like that.

And then of course, if you've got Pixelmator Pro, if you've got Acorn, if you've got Photoshop, you could always just use those.

And all this stuff could be done there.

I guess the whole point of this is if you don't have any of those and you just want to add some quick text without taking the photo out, just want to add a quick arrow, then this is what you would use.

Let's see if there are any questions before I wrap up.

Yeah, I'm sorry I wasn't able to show the transparency more, but you've got the idea.

At least I was able to show it to you.

And you could do that.

You know, the arrows can be semi-transparent.

You know, the stroke color can be like 50% yellow or whatever.

Boxes, circles, they all could be, you know, that.

The text could be semi-opaque.

But that's, on my other screen, I had the little, you know, change your cursor color.

So it could be this red that you saw.

And that was interfering with the color chooser in photos.

So normally in a video, I would just quit out of everything and go back in and everything would be fine.

But I can't do that live.

So yeah, saving time is definitely a time saver.

It definitely opens up the options.

Instead of sending somebody a photo and saying, here's this thing I saw on a walk today or on a trip.

and then leaving it up to them to find it in the photo, you could circle it.

Just real quick, just a quick circle.

And you could do the same thing.

You know, that does bring up something.

Saving time, there is something else I'll show you.

Let's say you want to share this photo.

Let's find a better one.

Let's say you want to share some sort of photo that's got like a, you can point to something.

Let's see here.

I don't know, we'll just do this one.

We'll do this one.

And let's say we want to do it, but we just want to do it in an email.

You could do share mail.

It's going to take that image.

It's going to put it in a new mail message, right? And here it is.

I'm going to go to image size.

I'm going to set it to large because I want to send somebody a nice size image.

But look at this.

If I move my pointer over this in the mail app, I get this button here.

And guess what's under that button? Markup.

So now I can use those same markup tools, arrow pointing at something.

Oh, and let's do a loop magnifier there like that.

Right? Let's change the loop to be red outline there as well.

Nice, right? Done.

This change now.

Let's go back to mail.

Why am I not? Oh, mail quit.

unexpectedly thank you mail for doing that uh while i'm doing a live demo let's see if it's saved that didn't uh but if i i'll just do a quick arrow here arrow so yeah arrow like that done now you can see the image here in mail has been changed what i'm sending to the person is a changed image.

But back in photos, I didn't change anything.

It shared to mail first.

Then I did the markup.

So really useful.

Same thing for sharing it in other ways, like to messages.

You could do quick little things like that in markup tools after it leaves photos instead of before it leaves photos.

So another thing to consider there.

Can you enter a numbers table into or over a photo? No, not really.

I suppose you could actually do the thing where it was like, you could go to preview, you know, edit with preview.

And then maybe if you copied a table and pasted it, it would paste over as a graphic.

You could certainly take it into some other app and do it.

And then, you know, paste one thing over the other.

You certainly take the photo into numbers and have the photo on the number spreadsheet.

So there's some options there, but not using like this specific technique.

so cool um yeah so i hope that uh you know this stuff was uh you know useful to some people uh i think it's definitely just a kind of a quick technique just good to know it's there could be useful could be fun and all of that so um thanks for watching Want to know about every new MacMost video each week? Sign up for the absolutely free MacMost email newsletter at MacMost.com slash newsletter.