Clean Up Your Photos Using Pixelmator Pro

You can use Pixelmator Pro to edit your photos directly from the Photos App. You can do simple repairs, or make selections to change only one part of the photo. You can even use layers and store those layers inside your Photos library.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use Pixelmator Pro to clean up your photos. 
So Pixelmator Pro, now officially an Apple App, is a great companion to Photos if you want to do more advanced editing and repairing of your photos. In fact you can use it directly from the Photos App. So you can select a photo like this in your Photos Library. If I want to edit it, of course I can use the Edit button here and I have all the editing controls that are inside of Photos. But I can also edit it in any external editor using Image and then Edit With. Of course I can use Pixelmator Pro as my editor as well as other things like PhotoShop. But another way to edit with Pixelmator Pro is to use Edit inside of Photos and then instead of or in addition to using the built-in tools in Photos click on the three dots button up here and choose Pixelmator Pro. It should appear here as long as you've got Pixelmator Pro installed. When you do that it is going to bring up a special interface here with pretty much all the functionality of Pixelmator Pro. But you can see I'm still here in Photos. But the advantage to using Edit With is you do get the Pixelmator Pro Menu Bar here which includes a lot of different things like the ability to save out as a Pixelmator document and export in different ways. If you just want to edit the photo doing it this way is the quickest. 
Now let's say we want to repair a photo. So this photo looks great except that if I zoom in here you can see I've got a scratch on my face. So let's repair it really easily. I'm going to use the Repair Tool here in the right sidebar. Now your right sidebar may look different than mine because you can customize it. But if you see this little bandaid icon here you can click it. Notice the keyboard shortcut is R. You can always use that as well. Now you're going to get a circle here that I can use for repairs. Note I can change the size using that slider there. It's important that you do change the size and zoom in. If I tried to actually use a really long large circle like this I'm not going to get good results. So I'm going to zoom in here using the trackpad but you can use Command and Plus as well. I want the brush size here to be fairly small compared to the area. So zoom in and adjusting the brush size is important. Once I get it to be about right I want to just kind of paint the area there that I want corrected. There I go! It's not a miracle worker. It won't fix everything but if you keep working with the brush size and the zoom size to match you should be able to get decent results for lots of simple things like blemishes like this. When you're done click Save Changes. Now you're going to get this dialogue here that asks if you want to Preserve, Edit, or Save Flattened. We'll look at the first option later. Right now I'm going to Save Flattened so basically it just saves it back normally to Photos. So you can see the change there. I can click here to see the original and I can click here to Revert To Original anytime I want. Photos always saves the original version so you can always go back. 
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You can do other things as well with Repair. So let's choose this photo of Jack as another example and make a few changes here. I'm going to go to Edit and then Pixelmator Pro and then let's zoom in here and I can see there's some threads here on his bandana. So, let's get rid of those. I can adjust the brush size, make it nice and small like that. Let's pain over that area here and see if it understands. Yeah, it does a fairly good job there. Let's try it right here and right here as well. You can see it kind of cleaned that up. Another thing you can do instead of brushing is Select & Repair. As an example let's get rid of a few of these leaves here. So I'm going to choose one of the selection tools. I'm going to choose this one right here which allows me to draw a free selection. So I'm going to draw around this leaf here, like that. Anytime you make a selection and you are going to use it for something like repairing you may want to go to Select & Mask. This tool right here allows you to do things like span the selection and change the softness so it doesn't have a hard edge to it. Then I can apply that. So now I've got the selection with a soft edge to it like that. I can go to the Repair Tool and notice one of the options here is Repair Selection. Click that and you can see it just repairs inside of there. Let me Undo and you can see I can also use the tool and brush in here. You can see it only brushes inside the selection. So you can also use it that way. 
Now here's another way to make a selection. You can use this tool here, Quick Selection. Then you see how it tries to grab onto whatever it sees as an object there. So it can grab onto this leaf right here and now it can go to Select & Mask. Let's expand it a bit. Let's change the softness there and Apply. Now I can use the repair tool and repair selection there as well. 
Let's look at another type of repair. Let's try to sharpen part of an image. So, you can go to Edit, for instance, and you can use Sharpen here to make things a little sharper which basically looks at the edges and defines the edges better. But if we want to do just part of the image we're going to have to go into Pixelmator Pro. If we do that we can now zoom in on an area. Now I love this photo but the focus is really on some of the leaves here which are a bit closer than this guy. So what I want to do is sharpen this. You can see it is a little soft around there. So I'm going to go to this tool here which allows you to sharpen. If you click on it you actually can see it Sharpen, Soften, or Smudge. Let's choose Sharpen here and you get Brush Size, just like before. You also get Softness. So all the way at 100% it's not going to sharpen very much. Zero it is going to sharpen a lot. Let's do somewhere in the middle here and then we have Strength as well. So I'm going to make the brush size a little smaller and let's see if I can make the fir around here a little bit sharper. We'll just do this one side. Like that. Now if I want to compare I've got this button here. So I can click and hold that. There's the original and there's the sharpened version. So again it is not a miracle worker. You can't get information from pixels that aren't there. But it can help in some situations like this. 
You can also use lighting to clean up photos. Like, for instance, in this stock image of a  crowd at a concert I don't like how this guy is a little more prominent. I want the focus on the two main subjects here. So let's go to Edit and then go to Pixelmator Pro here. I just want to darken this area a little bit. I could do that here using this tool. I've got Lighten & Darken. So I can select Darken here and I can try it out a little bit. That's too much. Let's Undo and maybe make the strength a little less, like that. Let's make the brush size smaller. We can just darken this area here and now he doesn't stand out so much. Likewise, I could actually paint over here and lighten the areas that I want. It would probably be better if I did it with an even smaller brush size, like this. Maybe try reducing the strength a little bit. Like that. I can make sure that my subjects stand out a little better in the resulting photos. 
Here's another example. I really like this picture of a squirrel here on this log except that the colors around are so bright. The squirrel kind of blends into the background. Let's see if we could fix that. I'm going to Edit here and then go into Pixelmator Pro. Now I could use the Lighten Tool and kind of paint him and make him brighter. But instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to use Selection Tools. First I'm going to use the Quick Selection and try to select the squirrel as best as I can. Free Selection here and zoom in and I can use Option to select areas to remove from the selection, like that. I can use Shift to actually select areas that maybe it didn't get as well. I can spend a lot more time cleaning up this selection here. Let's use the Shift Key to get his feet in also. I can go to Select & Mask and then I can expand this a little bit or change the softness. You can also in this mode paint. So I could remove from selection with the Option Key and paint this part out like that. I can Add just by painting normally. I can do a lot of different things to refine this selection. That will make it nice and soft there and Apply that. Alright so now that I've got the squirrel selected I can actually Copy him. I'm going to do Command C. Then I'm going to do Command V to Paste. Look what happens. I get a second layer here. 
Pixelmator Pro, like PhotoShop, can do multiple layers. Usually when we're editing an image we don't necessarily need to have multiple layers. Everything I've shown up till now doesn't really use them. But here it is useful. Now I can do things like use the Adjustments here.  I make adjustments just to the layer of the squirrel. So, for instance, I can bring the brightness up of the squirrel. Not too much. I can bring, maybe, the contrast up if I want. I can also bring up the texture if I like. Then down here under Saturation I can make the squirrel kind of have brighter colors and more vibrant colors. Now if I turn Off the squirrel later you can see the original squirrel there. Then the layer with just the squirrel on top. 
Now let's go to the Image Layer, the layer with everything on it. Let's do the opposite. Let's bring down the brightness, like that. Let's also turn down the Contrast. Like that. Then let's go here to Saturation. I can desaturate the entire rest of the photo here to make it black and white. But I'm just going to do something a little more subtle. Just desaturate a little bit. Bring the vibrance down just a little bit like that. So I helped bring the squirrel out a little bit. So now what I can do is I can Save Changes. This time I'm going to say Preserve Edits. So when I do that it goes back here into Photos. I can see the original and then here's the change. I can always Revert to Original and get rid of all those edits. But if I go back into Pixelmator Pro now I still have those layers here. It saved those layers into the Photos Library just so I would have them if I were to use Pixelmator Pro again to edit the image. 
So that is how to clean up your Photos using Pixelmator Pro on your Mac. Note you can do all of this with just regular files as well. You can open up a file in Pixelmator Pro and then make the same kinds of changes and then save it out back to a jpg or whatever the original format was, but also save it a s a Pixelmator Pro document that has all the layers and settings. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
Comments: 3 Responses to “Clean Up Your Photos Using Pixelmator Pro”

Sheldon
6 days ago
Thanks bunches
Charles Johnson
Thanks for this information
Trevor Hughes
5 days ago
Great video