How To Retouch and Repair Photos on a Mac

Using the Retouch tool in Mac Photos you can erase marks and blemishes and also repair damage to photos.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to retouch and repair photos in the Photos App on your Mac. 
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So the Photos App on your Mac has a tool in it that will help you retouch and repair photos and it is really simple to use. So as an example here let's look at this rose. This rose has some imperfections in it. If I zoom in here you can see some little marks on the rose itself. Maybe you want this to be a more perfect image of a rose. So to do that you want to edit the photo by clicking on the Edit button at the top right to go to the Editing Tools. Make sure you've selected Adjust here at the top. Then look at the Adjustment Tools here. One of them is called Retouch. Click on the disclosure triangle here to the left to reveal the tool. 
To use it, first you would select a size. So click and drag in the Slider here and you can see that circle change to show the size. If I want to get rid of this blemish here I want something that's just a little bit bigger than it. So let me make it about this size, like that. Once I've adjusted the size the Tool is ready to use. However, you can also click on this button here to the left of the size control to turn it On or Off. So you can see with this Off I'm just in regular mode with a regular pointer. With this On now I've got that circle there and I can Retouch. So all I need to do here is click and it will retouch that area. You can see how it smoothed over the imperfection there. 
Now the best way to work with this is to zoom in as much as you can. So I'm going to use my trackpad to zoom in or you can use View and then Zoom In and Zoom Out command, Plus Command, Minus to get to the small imperfections there. Adjust the size to get to the proper size for the imperfection and you can click there to get rid of it. I can still use two-fingers on the trackpad to move around. When there is an imperfection like this I don't have to click in different spots. I can just click and drag along the imperfection, like that. It's best to do this in small bits at first. So don't try to just over all of this but kind of click on certain areas, drag over others, and just keep going until you get things looking the way you want. 
Remember anytime you mess up, like maybe doing that and it kind of blurs that area there, just use Command Z to undo that last change. Then keep working on it. 
You always want to adjust the size to fit what ever it is that you're changing. Now there are keyboard shortcuts for doing this. The square bracket keys. You can go down and up in size using those so you don't have to keep moving over here. You can keep your pointer over the spot that you want to change and then resize the circle as needed. If you ever want to compare the changes you've made with the Retouch Tool you can turn it On or Off with this little blue checkmark here. Turning it Off removes all of the retouching that you've done. But you can turn it back On to get it all back. 
Now in addition to retouching you can also use this to Repair photos. So, for instance, here's a photo that was scanned in and the original photo was damaged. Let's Edit this and zoom in here to see this kind of crease in the photo. Let's go and use the Retouch Tool here. You see if I drag it over a small portion it does a pretty good job of getting rid of it. Zoomed in like this I can still see that there is a problem there. But it is not as bad as it was before. So I can just keep doing that in small sections and it won't completely repair the photo. It can't replace what isn't there. But, it will make it look as lot better when you're done. You can see that that section of the photo looks a lot better than it did before if I toggle between them. With a little more time and maybe using the tool at a smaller size with smaller sections you could do an even better job. 
Let's undo all these changes and look at another aspect of this. If you go to the Retouch Tool, notice at the bottom here it says Option Click to Choose a Source Area. So what the Source Area does is it represents a texture. So it's not going to take the color from that area but kind of the texture of it. So to help you avoid making the area you're retouching blurry. For instance, I can go and do Option and Click here and that is the Source Area now. So now when I go to draw on this notice how it shows me those crosshairs of the Source Area where it is taking the texture from. The result is that is should be taking kind of more of the texture from there so it will be a little less blurry than before. We want to watch that area to make sure it doesn't go onto a part of the picture that has a very different texture. But notice each time I drag the Source Area starts at the same point. So you may want to try switching between using a Source Area and not to see what results you can get. 
If you Control Click on the image there is the Clear Manual Retouch Source Point to turn that off and now it is just doing the repair as before. 
Here's another example of retouching use the Source Point. If I look here you can see there's kind of a glare on this apple. I can use retouching to get rid of it, like that. You can see how it creates this blurry area. But if I Option Click up here where there is a nice apple texture and then I use that texture area, look how much nicer that looks than the blurry area from before. It got rid of that shine but it kind of kept the same texture and the result is a little bit better. 
Another option is to use a third party app, like say Pixelmator Pro or Affinity Photo. I can edit directly from the Photos App. I'll use Image, Edit With, and then I'll select Pixelmator Pro. It will open up the image in Pixelmator Pro right there. There is a repair tool in Pixelmator Pro that I can use. You can see it also has a brush size and even the square bracket keys work to change the size of that. You can use this and see if maybe I get better results. 
So if you have some photos with some blemishes on them or you've scanned in some old photos that need repair try using the Repair Tool in the Photos App or the repair tools in third party apps, and see if you can make them better. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Retouch and Repair Photos on a Mac”

Cindy Cunningham

2 years ago

Great, Gary! Retouch demo was really helpful.

Don R

If you use the source point from a similar texture you will most likely get better results. In your example to repair the damage on the tree, use a source point from the tree trunk above or below where the damage is. Same thing with the roof of the house, take your source point from an undamaged part of the roof.

Jim Terrinoni

Good overview. A few points, such as how the source tool stays in the selected place will be helpful for beginners. Your emphasis on selecting the correct size was important.

Eric Hurner

Thanks for the video, but I'm not really very impressed by the results you're getting. You may repair the crease line but you also blur out the background. The reason I came here is because Mac Photos does such a very poor job compared to the old iPhoto, which worked on the same principle. I used to get much better results on that. Do you have any explanation for this? It used to be so that you could practically eliminate a crease line like that and still keep the integrity of the image.

Gary Rosenzweig

Eric: No way for me to compare them now, but I'd be shocked if iPhoto was better at this than today's Photos app. Maybe because photos back then had fewer pixels or just the photo I chose here.

Comments Closed.

How To Retouch and Repair Photos on a Mac

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Retouch and Repair Photos on a Mac”

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