Bring Out the Blue Sky In Your Pictures In Mac Photos

You can use the Mac Photos app adjustment tools to make a blue sky in your pictures deeper and bluer. You can adjust pure blue, or select a color in the sky to make fine adjustments. You can also limit the range of the changes to keep other parts of your photo the same.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to bring out the blue sky in your photos using the Photos app for Mac. Instead of looking like this, they'll look like this.
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So the Photos app on your Mac has a lot of different controls for allowing you to enhance your photos. One of the things that you can do is you can bring out certain colors. This is ideal for when you have photos where the sky is washed out. In an effort to take a good photo you're camera made the sky too bright, too white, too devoid of the blue that you actually saw when you took the photo.
I'm using Photos 4 which is part of MacOS Mojave. Here's a photo I took that has a lot of sky in it. But unfortunately the sky is a bit washed out. It's not as blue as I remember it. I want to bring that out. So I'm going to click the Edit button here. Make sure I select Adjust and then I have all my adjustment tools on the right. Now there are a bunch of things that you may want to go right to. For instance if you go to Color you can see I can adjust and make the sky much bluer but it does mess with the rest of the colors in the photo. So I'm not going to use that. You also have Curves and Levels so you can do things like select Blue there and and adjust the blue in the photo to bring out the sky but that also messes with the rest of the colors.
The tool I'm going to use is called Selective Color. If you look in that you can see a selection of colors one of which is blue. So I'm going to click blue so I'm adjusting that. Next I'm going to add some more Saturation. So I'm going to bring that up to about 50 to make it bluer. I can play with Luminance. If I bring it up it's going to make it brighter. So it will take away some of that blueness. I'm probably going to want to bring it down. Bring it down slightly here. 
So now I want to compare that to my original photo. I've got this button here on the upper left. If I click and hold that you can see there's the original photo and there's the new one. You can see this is quite an improvement. It's a much better photo now. I can continue to adjust this. Maybe a little more saturation and a little less luminance to get it with just the look that I want.
Here's another photo that could do with some enhancement for the sky. It has all this beautiful green here. More contrast with a nice blue sky would make it even better. So I'm going to go to Edit and go to the same Selective Color adjustments here. Select blue. Add some saturation to the sky. Remove some luminance and keep adjusting that until I get what I want. Notice that the sky is reflected in the water here. I can see that the blue there is also adjusted. If I click to compare I can see that the new version is much nicer than the old one but yet all the parts that are green and other colors are unaffected by this change.
Here's a photo that definitely can do with a bluer sky. But there's an issue here. There's a lot of blue down here in the lake. When I edit this one if I use blue here, adjust the saturation, luminance down, the lake changes a lot. Watch as I switch between them. You can see the color of the lake is changing as well as the sky. So instead of doing that, I'm going to Undo all that, I'm going to click the Eyedropper tool here. This allows me to select the color. So I don't have to pick pure blue. I can pick a color that I see here in the image.
I'm going to go to the darkest blue that I have in the sky which isn't very dark but it's near the top. I'm going to click that. That's the color I'm going to adjust. Now I'm going to change the saturation of that. Add the luminance a little bit. You're still going to see some changes down here in the lake. But if I adjust the Range that will limit the colors that are changed by this. So if I bring the range all the way down you can see the sky isn't going to look very at all. But if I bring it somewhere in the middle, like right around there, now I've got a situation where the lake isn't changed as much as the sky. So this version is the clear winner over this one.
Here's one last example. A little bit of blue here in the lake. If I use the Eyedropper tool, select the color of the sky here near the top, adjust the saturation up, luminance down I end up with a nice change there. To limit the damage to the lake I'm going to reduce that somewhat. So the lake still changes somewhat which kind of makes sense because the lake is reflecting the sky. But it's not going to change as much as the sky. It's a much nicer looking photo than the original.

Comments: 2 Responses to “Bring Out the Blue Sky In Your Pictures In Mac Photos”

Terry Haddow

9 months ago

Thanks Gary
I am wondering if the Photos app will get an adjustment brush ( like it had in Aperture) when it is updated for the net OS. What are your thoughts ?

Gary Rosenzweig

Terry: Do you mean like the Retouch tool? It has been there for a while. https://macmost.com/retouching-photos.html But it would be nice to have even more tools like that. Still, you have the ability to use third-party plugins, so maybe there is already something that works for what you want.

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Bring Out the Blue Sky In Your Pictures In Mac Photos

Comments: 2 Responses to “Bring Out the Blue Sky In Your Pictures In Mac Photos”

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