Creating a Dark Moody Effect With Mac Photos

Photos has a decent set of adjustment tools that you can use to change the mood of a photo. It is popular now to apply a bluish dark moody effect to photos and here are two ways to accomplish that. You can use light and color adjustments, or you can start with a filter and add some adjustments.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you how to create a dark moody effect in Mac Photos.
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So it's really popular today to apply effects and filters to your photos to create a mood. To make it dark and moody. Make it a little bluish. Bring out some of the shadows. You can do that typically in things like Lightroom or Photoshop. But I'm going to show you how to do it today just using Photos.
Let's use this photo as an example. It shows a forest during the day. There's sunlight coming through. It's very green and bright and we're going to try to make it moodier. So we're going to click Edit to get into the editing tools. From there we're going to start with working with the light. So I'm going to click here to reveal all of the options for light. If you don't see these click options there to open that up. There are many different ways to get this kind of effect. I'm going to show you one that I came up with but you can also make other adjustments to come up with the same thing. There's a lot of repetition here. For instance you've got Curved and Levels and you can do the same kinds of things with them.
The first thing I want to do is drop the Exposure down. Then I'm going to actually drop the Highlights down as well. The highlights are going to focus on the brightest parts of the photo. So the sunlight coming through now is muted. I'm going to bring out the shadows. So I'm going to go all the way up with the Shadows. That's going to bring out the darkest parts of the photo.
So now that I've got that done I'm going to move on to Color. Under Color I'm also going to open Options if you don't already have that and bring down the Saturation. I don't want to bring it down all the way. That makes it basically a grey scale or black and white photo. I'm going to bring it down maybe halfway. Maybe ¾ of the way. I want there to still be a hint of green here. These are after all trees. I want to bring it down like that. 
Now I want to go and create that blue effect. I'm going to use Curves to do that but you can use Levels. I find it quick and easy to do it in Curves. Curves, usually, you'll start off in RGB here and you want to switch to Blue. What we want to do is change that line. So I'm going to grab the top right corner of that line and bring it over about ¼ of the way. Now if you aren't careful you can very easily accidentally click a little bit down that line and now you're making this curve which is going to make it easy to blow out that blue color there. So you want to make sure you grab that top right corner and you're actually dragging a line there. So I'll bring it there.
Different photos are going to need different amounts. Sometimes you need to bring it halfway. This one halfway is definitely too much. I'm going to bring it ¼. Now that I've got that I'm going to go back up to Light here and I'm going to change Brightness. I'm going to make it darker until I get just the right look. I find doing this last really helps because different photos need different things. So now there you go. That's kind of the effect I was after. I can use the tool here to show the photo with and without adjustments. I can click and hold and see there is the original and I can see there's my moody version.
As I said there's more than one way to do this. Another way I found to do it is to use one of the filters and do a few adjustments after that. So let's go to another photo to look at another example here. I'm going to go to this church yard with the gravestones in it. This is the perfect one where it's just too bright. Look how green that grass is and how bright that sky is. Let's give it some moodiness. 
So I'm going to go to Edit. But instead of jumping right to the Adjustment tools I'm going to go to Filters. One of the filters that comes with Photos is Dramatic Cool. Now what I would like it to be is moody cool but I'll use dramatic cool as a starting point. So now I can go to Adjustments here and I find that if I jump right away to Saturation and desaturate it to get rid of a lot of that green but still leave a hint of it there. That works out really nice. Now it's not going to have enough of that blue effect here so I'm also going to go and make the blue curve adjustment that I made before. Once I get it to there I'm ready to jump right to Brightness and make it a little less bright. So now you can see the change there. Accomplishing more or less the same thing just using different tools.
So, of course, the exact adjustments are going to depend on the photo itself, the mood you're trying to create, and your personal style. But it gives you an idea of what you can do with those Adjustment tools in Photos.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Creating a Dark Moody Effect With Mac Photos”

Karen

6 years ago

My photos on my Mac doesn’t show all the editing features that you show. I’m using El Captain Thanks Karen

Gary Rosenzweig

Karen: You’ll need to update to Mojave to get the most recent version of Photos.

Anne

Bless you again Gary. I do use the settings under Edit but never thought of combining adjustments with filters. Now I'll have some fun. Thank you +++

Comments Closed.

Creating a Dark Moody Effect With Mac Photos

Comments: 3 Responses to “Creating a Dark Moody Effect With Mac Photos”

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