Add A Color Tint To Photos With Preview

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Did you know that you can tint your photos using Preview. As a matter of fact you can also so this in the Photos app. I'm not talking about color adjustments here. This is something different. Watch!

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of supporters. You can go to MacMost.com/patreon where you can read more, join us, and get exclusive content.

So I'm going to open up this photo here in Preview. You probably know that there are color adjustment tools. The way to get to them is to click on the Markup tool here and then you can click this little prism to adjust color. Then you have all these controls here. You can, indeed, tint the photo. You notice that you've got green and purple. You can go back and forth between them and tint there. You can also adjust things like saturation, temperature. You can even use Sepia here to pull some color out as well.

The little eyedrop tool allows you to select any color and pull it out. So I can select blue and it gets rid of a lot of the blue there. Now these are great. But if you really want a specific effect, like you want to choose an actual color and tint the photo that color, these won't work for you. I'm going to show you a completely different technique.

So we're going to stick to the markup tools but I'm going to add a rectangle. So I'm going to change the color of this box. First I'm going to get rid of the border. So I'm going to click on the border here and I'm going to use the transparent border. It's got the little red line through it saying no border. Then I'm going to click on the fill color here and I'm going to change the color that I want. So say I  want to tint this entire thing to give it kind of an orange hue. So I'll select orange there. 

Now it shows just an opaque box there. But if you notice here there's Show Colors. I click that and it brings up the color tools. I have various tools here. They all have one thing in common. That's at the bottom here you have the ability to change how opaque the color is. So I can bring that down. Notice now I can see through it. Better yet, it's kind of acting like a lens, a colored lens. I want to drop it down quite a bit. In this case I'll go down like 30% and you can see how I've tinted the image. Now I need to fill the entire image with it so I'm going to move it to the upper left hand corner. It's okay to move past the edge there. I'm going to take this corner here, drag that dot down below the bottom right. That fills the entire image. There I go! I've colorized the image there.

So then I'm going to Save it. You can do Command S or File, Save. I can close it out like that and if I reopen it notice that it's permanently applied. So I had the ability to change it before I close the document because it's a Jpeg document. It's not saving those markups. It's just saving the final image. When doing this you want to make sure to be careful you've got the original kept saved somewhere. Maybe duplicate the file first and then work on the duplicate.

So we can do this in the Photos app directly. I'll go to the Photos app here and I click Edit. One of the things we can do with Edit mode is go to External Editors. But one of those external editors is always going to be Markup which gives you access to the same markup tools that are in Preview. So you go to Markup and now I can draw a rectangle, just like before. I can set its border to nothing. It already was. I can set the color to whatever I want or just go right to Show Colors and use anyone of these tools to pick the color I want. So we can make this, say, a nice bright yellow. Change the opaqueness of it and then stretch it to fill the entire image.

The great thing about doing it here is that it Saves this. So I can go and say Save Changes and then exit the editor by clicking Done. You can see I have my tint there. But if I go to Edit and then I go back into Markup I still have that box there. So that's nice. I'm able to now modify it. So I can change the color and make it something that's a little bit better. In this case the color palette appears behind the window, unfortunately. So it's a little harder to deal with. But I can certainly can change it to something else. Change how opaque it is. Just give it a little bit of a tint for instance. 

Then the nice thing is also that Photos allows you to revert back to the original image very easily. You've got the Revert to Original button right there. I can flip between the two versions. So here's the version with the tinted lens covering it and then here's the original version that I can see.

Now while it could be useful to use this with colors I like using it with black and white as well. Watch what happens. If I change this to a pure white, so I'll go into the gray scale slider and go to white, you can see you can fade this image back. If I change it to black it just darkens the entire image but it does it in a nice even way. This is really useful if you want to set this up as the background for something like in a project on a page with some text on it. Even as your desktop background. Sometimes the full strength image is too bright and distracting. But darkening it, like that, or fading it out with white can be just the thing you need.