How To Use the New Mac AI Photo Editing Tools

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new AI editing tools that are part of the Photos App in macOS Golden Gate. 

So a new a feature in the Photos App in macOS Golden Gate is the Tools Section under Editing where it brings together some of the older tools like Retouching and Erasing with newer some  tools like Extending the Photo and Reframing. All of these use AI or machine learning to some extent to help you edit your photos. 

So let's start off here with this photo which I have used over the years to show Retouching and the various different ways it has been available in the Photos App. You can see where with this rose there are some imperfections in it. You can easily clean those up with using Retouching tools going back years. Let's see how the new tools do with this. So I'm going to click the Edit button here and now you'll see at the top you've got Adjust Filters, Crop, and Tools. Click on Tools and you'll see the 3 tools listed on the right with lots of space suggesting that Apple may add more tools in the future. 

When you go to cleanup you actually get two tools in here, Erase and Retouch. Let's go to Retouch by clicking on the little brush tool here and you can see I've got this circle now that I can move over the image. I can Resize the circle and make it bigger or smaller. Let's go and use the circle and drag it over this area here, like that, release and you can see how it removes that blemish. Let's try it over here, like this, and here, even here, and you can see it does a pretty good job. It will probably do even better by zooming in more and getting a much smaller area.

Now typically you can use this tool to get rid of blemishes on people's faces so let's try that. Let's edit this blemish here. It is going to be hard to find any kind of blemish because this is a stock photo, but we can just pretend and go to Cleanup and go to the Retouch Tool here and just make little corrections like that. You get the general idea. 

Now let's look at erasing things. So I want to go into this image here which looks great all on its own. But, if I look closely I can see there are people here in the background. It would be nice just to kind of get rid of them and make it look as if there was nobody there. So I'm going to go to Tools and Cleanup again the this time I'm going to click the Erase Tool. I've got Size here, so the size of the circle, and I've also got Image Quality. So there's basically the Fast version of this and the High Quality version. Let's switch from Auto and just go to Fast for now. Let's try to get rid of this person here by dragging around. You can see it instantly gets rid of it. I can do it here as well and that's what Fast does. 

If I go to High Quality it's a little different. I select somebody there and it doesn't actually do anything yet. It says Keep Brushing. So I'll do a little more there and do some more here and then I click the Cleanup Button and it does it all at once. It's got its own progress bar there. It takes its own time to do this. Theoretically the result should be better here. There we go. It got rid of all those people using this. 

Now for either the Erase or Retouch you've got the Reset Button here to reset it but you could also have gone and used the Undo Keys. So Command Z, Undo, and you can always use this button here at the top left to compare the original to the changes.

Now of course it works well on those little tiny people way in the background. Let's see how well it works if you try to get rid of larger items, like these people here that are much closer to the camera, by using the Erase Tool. So as you can see here one of the things that we've got is that it notices the people that are there. See how there is kind of a halo around them. So let's say instead of brushing we're going to click. You can see how it is going to get rid of that whole group of people that it recognizes. It could have brushed to be more specific but I can just let it do its thing and get rid of the people, like that. So you can cleanup a lot of this image but remember it can't see what's behind them so it is just marking it up. So you can see in some cases you want to be careful when using this. Examine the changes very carefully to see what the results are. Let's Undo here and see if we can maybe switch to High Quality and see if it does a better job. So actually not too bad there. I mean it's not what is actually back there. We can't know what that is unless we go back to look. But it does look realistic, at least. 

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Now let's look at the other tools here. I'm going to start by looking at Extend. This is a good picture for that because with the subject a little bit too far to the right there and maybe you want to get more centered. Your only choices originally was to maybe crop off the left and make a square photo. But with Extend you can extend the photo here to the right, like that. What it is going to do, of course, is it is going to makeup what's over here. So probably not something you want to use with your personal photos from vacation. But if you're working on a graphics project, making an ad or some clipart or you want  something really nice for a presentation you're doing in Keynote, something like that, it doesn't really matter if this exists in reality or not. You're just trying to make a nice graphic. Then you can see how using Extend can work. Now I've got this subject here right in the middle. Notice here when you go to Extend you are basically cropping, but outwards to parts of the image that don't exist. So you can grab any corner you want, like that. You can hold the Option Key and it will expand in all directions, like that. You can just go top to bottom, left to right, get it exactly what you want and it gives you this nice grid with thirds here because a lot of the time you're doing this you're trying to get some element of the photo right where when one of these crosses, like that. It is going to help you build a better picture from your original. I also really like that it is not changing this part of the photo at all. At lot of times with AI Tools you give it a photo and it extends it but it is actually remaking the entire photo. So in this case it's doing it the proper way, as a lot of professional tools, by keeping all the pixels from the original photo there and just adding more around the edges. 

So that brings us to our last tool. Reframe. So Reframe is the most impressive of all of these. What it is going to do is it is going to look at the depth of all of the things in the photo. Either using machine learning to figure out what's close and what's far.  But also using a depth map of what's provided by the camera, like say if you're using Portrait Mode on your iPhone. It is going to analyze it, like this, and figure out what's close and what's far. It is not just a foreground and a background. It's many, many layers. So once it is analyzed it is ready to go. You've got controls here on the right but you can also click and drag around like this. You can see how it is basically making it look like you're moving as the photographer to a slightly different location. When it is doing that of course it can't see behind things so it is doing a little of making it up. The same thing with stuff around the edges, like this. Now in addition to being able to drag it around like you want you can use these Sliders here. So you've got the vertical and horizontal reframing, so basically the angle of the camera in each dimension. Then you've got the panning, so you can actually move up or down and make it look like the camera was in a slightly different spot. You can also straighten the image. Rotate it so in another dimension there. You can also Zoom in or out. So if you don't want to include that much extra new stuff you can zoom in a little bit more. Straighten it. Change things about it like that. Of course when you're done and you click the Reframe button what it's going to do is it is going to try to fill in all of the spaces of things where it couldn't see behind other objects and maybe a little bit around the edges as well. So it is using some of that same technology for Extend to Reframe this. So now that it has been reframed we can compare the original, just like with any other editing tool by clicking here so you can see the difference. 

Here's an example where there is really nothing in the foreground here. We're just going to reframe this landscape here. You can see it still works. You can still do it. So it doesn't require there to be something that is substantially in the foreground and something else that's substantially in the background. It will still allow you to do some reframing. You can see how little the panning moves here because most of the objects are far away but the rotation still gives you a lot you can do so you get more of a downward view, like that. So you can see the reframed version and here's the original. So very different angle there. 

So these are great new tools to have, just standard now in the Photos App on your Mac starting with Golden Gate. I see people using these a lot particularly in the kind of photos that include yourself or other people, especially if you are handing your iPhone or camera to someone else and they take a shot and it is not really framed well or you've got some objects that are in the way and you just want to move things around a little bit or maybe you need to Extend to one side or the other just to get the subject in the right spot in photo. Of course cleaning up and retouching has its uses as well. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.