Editing Photos With Affinity Photo Extensions

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at using Affinity Photo directly in the Mac Photos app by using its extensions.

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So you can use Affinity Photo one of three ways on your Mac. One way is to run Affinity Photo and then open an image file and edit it in Affinity Photo. Another way is in the Photos app you can have an image selected and then go to Image, then Edit With, and then choose Affinity Photo. This opens Affinity Photo and allows you to edit this image but then it syncs back to your Photos Library when you're done.

A third way is to edit the image inside of the Photos app and then click here and now you have a variety of different extensions that you can access that allow you to adjust the photo using Affinity Photo's tools without ever leaving the Photos app. So, for instance, lets choose Affinity Develop. This gives you a variety of different controls here for editing things like exposure, White Balance, Shadows, Highlights and a bunch of enhancement tools and things like that. So I can adjust the exposure, maybe the saturation a little bit, decrease the shadows, increase the highlights and do a little bit of noise reduction. Then click Save Changes.

Now you can see the result here in the Photos app. I never left the Photos app. I never ran Affinity Photo. Just like with any editing you do in the Photos app you can see the original and compare it here or you can click Revert to Original. Photos always saves the original version of this. So basically using Affinity Develop is an alternative to using the controls that are here inside of Photos itself. I'm not sure if Affinity will actually do a better job but if you're used to using Affinity Photo using those tools is preferable to learning the Photos tools.

Let's revert to the original here and use another tool here. I'm going to use Haze Removal. There's a little bit of haze in the back here of this image. If I use the Haze Removal tool you can see how I can get rid of this. Now I like how you always have the option of a split view here. For Haze Removal it's automatically turned on and you could see what it looks like before and after. So you could see Haze Removal does a really good job. I can change things like the Distance so I can have the haze stay in the background like that. I can have the strength of the tool itself. Then click Save Changes and now it saves it there. Again I still have the Revert to Original option.

Another option here is Affinity Miniature. I can use that to do that cute photo effect where it makes everything kind of look like it's in miniature here. So I can increase the strength a bit and you can see it just creates a fuzzy background here and makes everything look like it's kind of miniaturized. I may actually want to switch the mode to tilt here and then I can click on these dots here and maybe adjust it here so it kind of fits the angle of the river and then I could maybe adjust some of these lines like that. Hit Save Changes and I have that effect applied.

Another tool is the Retouch Tool. So you can use this to do a variety of different things for retouching the image. So I can zoom in here. I'm just using the trackpad to zoom in. You can see there are some blemishes here so I can use a variety of different things. Let's use Healing here. I do a click and you can see it performs that healing. I have Undo and Redo buttons here. So I can do a variety of different things. So, for instance, I could use one of the other tools, like a Smudge here, to smudge out a blemish as well. There's also a Liquidfy tool and you could use that and it basically allows you to distort the image. It gives you this grid here so you could now push pixels around. You've got Push Forward and Push Left, Pinch. A bunch of different things. So if I click here with the Push tool you could see how it's going to distort the image. To give you an idea of what it's doing you can see that grid on there afterwards. I can Undo that and do different things. Like Turbulence tool just to basically make that grid kind of random there. Freeze tool which will freeze a certain area and then I could go and use one of these other tools, like Push, to push things but keep this area frozen in the middle. Let's Save Changes on that and you can see here what I end up with.

There's also a tool called Monochrome. You can imagine what this does is it converts it to a grayscale image. But you can adjust things. So this flower here is red. So I can adjust exactly what happens to the red color in here. Whereas the leaves are green so I can adjust those as well. So it's a little more powerful than just making it a black and white image. I could also colorize it in by setting a color for the highlights. So let's have the highlights here the brightest color and I can set whatever the hue is for that. But I could also say well I want to saturate the dark portions here with a separate color. So I can make the dark portions one color and the light portions another color.

So these extensions are really handy for making some quick edits. I did find them to be a bit buggy particularly when using raw images which is a shame because the Develop Extension is ideal for raw images. That's exactly what you want to do with a raw image is you want to apply some of these changes to create your final version. Unfortunately for me I got Error messages most of the time when I tried to use the Affinity Develop Extension with a raw image.

But other than that if you have Affinity Photo it's worth playing around with these to see what you can do.