Learn How To Edit Your Pictures In Mac Photos In 5 Minutes

Here's a quick start guide to using the Photos app to edit your pictures. You can straighten, crop, adjust light and colors, fix problems and add filters.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you the basics of editing photos in the Mac Photos app. 
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So to edit a photo in the Photos App the first thing you want to do is go to the photo in either your Library or in any Album. Double-Click it and now you're viewing just that photo. Now you'll see an Edit button at the top right. Click that Edit button and now you'll go into the editing screen and there are three modes. You can see them at the top. Let's start with Crop and let's use this to straighten the photo. You can use the Straighten Tool here at the top and adjust to get it perfectly straight. You'll see these grid lines here which will help you. So I'm going to leave it right there and you can see how the grid line matches the top of the lake right here. 
Now to Crop what you need to do is grab one of these corners or an edge. So, for instance, I can drag the bottom right corner in like this. You'll notice you get these grid lines here that give you the rule of thirds intersections. These spots right here where you may want to line up an interesting point in your photo. You can continue to Crop in or at any point you can push out as well. Also, once you've cropped in some you can just grab the middle of the photo and move it around. You also have the ability over here to choose specific aspect ratios. So you can use original or you can choose something very specific like square or 16 by 9. 
Next, let's go to the Adjustment Tools. The first tool you'll want to look at is Auto Enhance. As a matter of fact Auto Enhance is there even before you use the editing tools. You click it and it's going to make adjustments throughout a bunch of these. You can see it adjusted light and color. You can click it again just to go back to the original. Or you can make adjustments in anyone of these categories. For instance for Light I can click Auto. I can use this Undo button here to remove it. I can expand this section here and then I have a general slider where I can go left to right to adjust all of the lighting settings. I can also expand Options and you can see how I can individually adjust things like Exposure and Brightness. So if you're going for something specific you can use these. Otherwise you can just use this slider right here and the same thing here for color. You can use the general slider here to increase the colors or decrease, desaturate them. You can also see all of the options to work with these settings individually. There's also the Auto button for Color as well. 
A typical thing you might do is under Light and under Options you might want to work with shadows and highlights to increase the brightness or the darker parts of the photo and decrease the brightness of the brightest parts of the photo. In addition in Color you might want to work with Saturation here to bring the colors out. When you're using Adjustments here you've got this button at the top left. You can click and hold it to see the original without the adjustments and release to see the adjustment.
Another tool here is the Retouch Tool. Expand that and click on it to activate it. All you need to do to retouch the photo is drag around in the area that you want to change. It's going to try to heal the photo in that spot. In this case getting rid of those rocks there. So you can use this in a variety of different ways on a landscape like this or on a closeup of somebody to get rid of blemishes on their skin. 
Now the third section here is Filters. Go into that and you have a small selection of filters you can use to change the mood. So I can go from the original to a vivid warm version of this. Note that with each filter you can adjust the percentage here. 
Now photos editing is nondestructive. That means that you can always revert back to the original no matter how many changes you've made. So you've got the Revert To Original button here at the top left. But even when you're not in editing mode with the photos selected here you can go to Image and then you can revert to original to go back, remove all the cropping, all the adjustments, and all the filters. 
Now if a photo was taken with the iPhone using Portrait Mode then when viewing it you should see that indicated up here. You can then go into Edit Tools and you'll find an extra set of tools here at the top and also the Portrait Modes here at the bottom. So I can adjust the depth here so unblurring the background if I like. I can also go to one of these other modes, like Studio Light, and when I do not only can I work with the depth but I can change the lighting as well. 
As you saw there there are also a lot of other adjustment tools. But if you want to go even beyond that you can use your own external editor. With a photo selected you can go to Image and then Edit With and then choose any app on your Mac that will edit photos. So I can Edit this in PhotoShop, make changes, and when I Save it won't save it as a file but back here to your Photos Library. Also when you're editing a photo you'll notice here this button with three dots in it, if you click on that that shows you extensions added by third party apps. But even if you don't have any of those apps you're going to have the Markup Tool here. Go into that. Now you can do things like adding shapes, or adding text to your photo. 
So those are the basics for editing photos on your Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Learn How To Edit Your Pictures In Mac Photos In 5 Minutes”

David Gerety

11 months ago

Gary, this just keeps getting better. My copy of Lightroom 6.14 was just corrupted and can't be replaced, so I began using Luminar 4, which is so-so in comparison. Now I find that editing in Mac Photos for 90% of my work is just as good. Thanks for showing us how easy it can be.

DiAnn

10 months ago

Thanks Gary for the quick & easy to understand guide to easy photo editing. As someone who isn't too skilled at computer anything, your easy to follow informationals help me to learn new skills when I need them. Hoping to be able to become a Patreon subscriber in the near future.

Steven Fink

I have been waiting for a program, like this one, on adjusting my 100 pictures. Thanks!