Using External Editors With the Mac Photos App

While Photos has a lot of adjustment and cropping tools, you can also use your favorite image editor directly with the Photos app. You can choose to edit the photo in an editor and have the results saved back to your library, or you can use an editing extension for even tighter integration. See examples using Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Pro.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can edit photos in external editors on your Mac. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So in the Photos App you can select a photo, click Edit, and then make lots of different adjustments to the photo, apply filters, Crop as you want. You can do that all in the Photos App. No need for a third party app. But if you want to go further you can edit a photo in a third party app very easily right from the Photos App. You don't need to export this, save it as a file, open it up in that other app, export it again, and then drag it back into Photos. You don't need to do any of that. There are two ways in the Photos App where you can go directly from Photos to another app and then back to Photos very easily. 
The first is before you click Edit here go to Image and then Edit With. Here you're going to see a list of apps that accept Photos as a media type. Now some of these don't make sense for editing. Like browsers, for instance, or QuickTime Player. But others, like Photo Shop, Acorn, Pixelmator Pro, they're all built for photo editing. So you can use those to edit. As an example here let's use Affinity Photo. You can see the last used application for external editing was Affinity Photo. So it even has a handy keyboard shortcut you can use. Command Return. If we go into Affinity Photo you can see it opens up this image here. Now we can do things with it that we couldn't do in Photos. Things you can only do in an editor like this. Like for instance let's divide things into layers. I'm going to use this Brush selection tool here to select Jack. Then with him selected I'm going to do Command X to cut Jack out of the image and Command V will paste Jack back in but as a separate layer here. Now I'm going to select just the background here and then do a special effect, Gaussian blur. Make just the background blurry. I'm going to select Jack and I'm going to apply an adjustment layer and do Brightness & Contrast and now make brightness more. It effects both layers there. The way this works in Affinity Photo is you need to drag this underneath Jack there. Make it part of that one layer. So now the brightness is only applied to Jack. 
Now to get this back into the Photos App all I need to do is Save. When I do that it will ask me how to save it. I'll just say Save Flattened and now I can close this out. Back here I've got the new version. If I go to Edit I can switch between the old and the new version like that and I can revert to original if I want. 
Now using Image Edit With is great and it's functionality that will give you just about any app that can edit an image. But the better way to do it is to go to Edit and then click on this button here with three dots in it. The Extensions button. This is going to give you some extensions that come from third party apps. Now not all Image editing apps are going to have a Photo's extensions. So you may not see your preferred app in here. Notice how the list is smaller. But you're going to see some of those, like Pixelmator Pro and then Affinity Photo and Acorn here because they do have extensions for the Photos App. Now we'll add them here. As a matter of fact Affinity Photo has a lot of extensions. One of which is to Edit in Affinity Photo but others are special  ones that will just do one effect on the image. Now if we select one of these it is very similar to using the Edit With function. But the integration is a lot tighter. So if you're going to do say Pixelmator Pro use this rather than Edit With. Now you can see how quickly it launches and you're still in the Photos App. 
I'm going to use Control S which in Pixelmator Pro will select just the subject. You can see what good of a job it does. I'm going to use Q which allows me to select an area and I can use Option to get rid of some extra space that is there. I can use Shift to add some if I want just to fine tune this. Now I can Cut here and then I'll Paste In. Notice I get another layer just like in Affinity Photo there. With Jack selected I'm going to go over to the Adjustments here and I'm going to change the brightness, to make Jack brighter. Then I'm going to select the other layer here which is the background. For this one I'm going to go to Effects and I'm going to Add Effect and under blur there's actually even a Boca effect. So now I can add a Boca effect and maker it even blurrier in the background if i want to.
Now since I'm actually still editing within Photos, you see I'm kind of in a Pixelmator window inside of photos, I can click the Save Changes button here at the upper right. It even gives me the options, since in some cases there's preserve edit, so I'll do that and now I'm back here in the Photos App and you could see that's the new version, that's the original version. I can use Revert To Original here and as a bonus, if I want to go back into Pixelmator Pro my layers are preserved. The effects and everything are preserved so I can make further adjustments.
So if you need more than what you can do with the adjustment's filters and cropping inside the Photos App see if your favorite photo editor is listed here in Extensions. If so use it there. If not exit editing and go to Image, Edit With and try editing with it here. I encourage you to try a few examples with your favorite editor and see how they work. Remember you could always go back here in Photos, Edit and Revert to Original like that. So don't be afraid to see how your favorite photo editor works for you with the Photos App. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Using External Editors With the Mac Photos App”

Patrick Mc Namee

2 years ago

Gary great movie and for me Affinity Photo is really all I need

Michael

Thanks Gary. This was a revelation. I didn't know this was possible. I managed to switch over to Adobe Lightroom Classic and carry out the edit. However, I cannot find a way of closing the photo in LR and switching back to the edited photo in Photos. Any thoughts? Thanks Michael BTW there does not seem to be an integrated extension for LR within Photos?

Gary Rosenzweig

Michael: Not sure if Lightroom will work like that as it is also a photo organizer like Photos is.

Gary, you are absolutely correct regarding the interaction with LR. I think the best summary on the web regarding this subject that I found after your reply was: "Both are image organising databases with a parametric (nondestructive) editing module. Neither is an all-purpose, pixel-based image editor. Because of the way they're designed, you can't use Lightroom as an external editor for very much the same reasons that no other program can use Apple Photos as an external editor"
Thanks Michael

Robert Bailey

Although I have (and have used) Affinity Photo for over 3 years now, my Photos app (Monterey) does not give me the extensions your screen shows. Is this something I need to do in the Affinity app itself?

Robert: Are you using the latest version of macOS and the latest version of Affinity Photo? In System Preferences, Extensions, Photos Editing do you see them there and are they checked?

Comments Closed.

Using External Editors With the Mac Photos App

Comments: 6 Responses to “Using External Editors With the Mac Photos App”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information