Adjusting the Look of Photos

In this video, we’re going to take a look at adjustments in our Photos app on the Mac. With adjustments, what we’re able to do is adjust the saturation, the lightness, or even add a vignette to our photos and videos. Let’s see how this works. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I’m looking at this photo here and I want to make some adjustments to it. Maybe I want to add some more color to it, saturation, or make it black and white. We do this through Adjustments. To get to our adjustments, we have to go into our edit mode. So I go up to the right here in the tool bar and you’re going to see Edit, and now we’re in edit mode.

By default, the Photos app will take you to all of your adjustment tools. So over on the right, we have all of the different adjustment tools that are available to us. This includes light, color, black and white. We also have white balance, curves, levels, we can adjust the definition, noise reduction, sharpen, or even add a vignette to our photos and videos.

Now, most of these are available to both photos and videos, but there are a few of them that are not available to video. This includes our retouch and red eye. But most of these are available in both photos and videos and they work the same.

So how do they work? Well, we can have the Photos app automatically apply these adjustments to us. Or what we can do is we can adjust some ourselves. We can also have the photos app, make the initial adjustments automatically adjust it, and then we can go and fine tune it.

So I wanted to add color to this photo here. The way that I would do that as I would go up to Color here, and if I want the Photos app to apply to me automatically, I go over to the right. You’re going to see Auto. I click on it, and now when we look at the photo, it has a little bit more color.

If you want to compare to the original, you go to the upper left-hand corner, you’re going to see these two squares. I click on it and now I’m looking at the original. I let go, there it is with the adjusted color.

If I no longer want to apply this color, I just go back over to this check mark here, I click on it and it turns it off.

So if I want to apply a little more definition to this, I go over to the right. And if you look at the clouds, when I click on this, I click on Auto. We have a little more definition. Again, to compare to the original, I just go up to the top here in the upper left hand corner. I click, there’s the original. There it is with my adjustments.

If I no longer want to have that, I just go over and de-select this.

We can apply multiple adjustments. So I could apply my color adjustment and my definition adjustment to this photo. And again, we can do this with both photos and videos.

We can also fine tune this. I’m going to go back over to my color. Let’s go and click on Auto. I want to fine tune this. In order to fine tune it, we go over to the left. You’re going to see the little carrot here. And now what I’m able to do is adjust the color, the saturation, I just drag this white line over to the left or right. And you’re going to see it’s making that adjustment on the fly. If I want to undo, I just click on the little arrow here and it brings it back.

Now some of these are going to have multiple adjustments. I’m going to close this and let’s take a look at Light. I click on the carrot, and what I’m able to do is click on Auto. It’s going to automatically adjust it. And then I can drag this over to fine tune it. This particular adjustment has options. So I click on the carrot here and now I can fine tune it. I can adjust the highlights, the shadows, the brightness, the contrast. I’m going to de-select it here, and it takes those adjustments off.

With histogram, what we have is no adjustments. All it does is give us a histogram. When I click on the carrot here, I’m able to see where the color falls within the photo, but I can’t make any adjustments to it. When you are making adjustments, this is where you might want to view. I’m not going to get into the details of that, this is more of a photography type trick, but when I go over to my color here and I click on Auto, what we can do is we can see how it affects the color balance across our entire phone. So you may want to leave histogram open while you’re making your other adjustments.

With retouch and red eye, we can retouch a photo, we can reduce red eye in a photo. I’ll talk about those in another lesson. I also have selective color. I’ll talk about that in another lesson too, but what I’m able to do with selective color is make adjustments to a specific color.

If I go over to curves here, what I’m able to do is adjust my photo by adjusting the curve. I’m going to undo this, I click on the arrow here to bring it back. If we want to add a vignette, I go down to vignette here. I click on Auto, and what it will do is darken the corners of the photo. If I want to adjust this again, I go over to the carrot here and now I can add more of a vignette to it. If we look at the corners, you’re going to see there darker.

Once you’ve made your adjustments, you can also reset the adjustments or what you can do is revert back to the original. What I like to do is use Auto Enhance as a starting point, I click on Auto Enhance and then from there, what I’m able to do is make further adjustments.

So that’s how we make adjustments to our photos and videos in the Photos app on the Mac. We just select what photo or video you want to make adjustments to, click on Edit in the upper right hand corner. The Photos app will automatically go to adjust. We have a number of different tools available to us, a number of different adjustments available to us. We can have the Photos app automatically make adjustments by clicking on Auto. If you do not like the adjustment, you can just de-select it. Most of the adjustments have further adjustments. We click on the carrot to the left of the adjustment. And from there you can fine tune any adjustments.

So that’s how we make adjustments to our photos and videos in the Photos app on the Mac.