Apply Filters to your Photos and Videos

In this video, I’m going to show you how you can apply filters to your photos and videos on the Mac. In addition to applying filters, I’m also going to show you how you can adjust, how much of that filter is applied. Let’s take a look at applying filters in the Photos app on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I am in my Photos app, and I’m looking at my library. Let’s take a look at this photo here. This is a photo of the Durango and Silverton Railroad over in Colorado. I double click on it. It opens it up. Looking at this photo, I think it’d be pretty cool as a black and white photo or a monochrome, silvertone photo. The easiest way to do this is by applying a filter.

We have various filters available to us that can change the tone of a photo. We can make a vivid, vivid, warm, vivid, cool, dramatic, dramatic, warm, dramatic, cool. As well as mono, silvertone, and noir. The last three being more black and white.

How do I apply a filter to this? Well it’s pretty simple. All we have to do is just go to the upper right-hand corner where you see Edit. When I click on Edit, we go to the top bar here and you’re going to see Filters. I select Filters. And then over on the right, we have all of our different filters that we can apply.

So I want to make this a monochrome or a black and white photo. To do that, I just go down to mono, I click on it. And now we can see it’s a black and white photo. It removed all of the color. Let’s see what this looks like as a vivid warm photo. This looks like it might be very cool as vivid warm. I select vivid warm here, and now we can see it changed the temperature or the color of it.

Now I mentioned in the introduction, we can also adjust the level of these filters. If we go over to the right, I’m looking at my vivid warm here. If we go over to the right, you’re going to see it says 100 on it. That’s because it is applying 100% of this filter. If you want to adjust how much this filter is applied, all you have to do is just go over to the right here and you drag this to the left. You’re going to see that that number changes. Right now it is at 58%, which means it’s applying 58% of the filter. If I go all the way over to zero, it’s basically like not applying a filter at all. So we can easily adjust how much of that filter we want applied to the photo.

Let’s take a look at this with mono. Right now it is at a hundred percent, which means it’s a hundred percent black and white. I go over to the right here and all I have to do is just drag this to the left and you’re going to see it slowly adding the color back into that photo. We can see the reds just starting to pop out on this roof. Here we can see the green, just starting to pop out and the mountain.

If you want to compare this to the original photo, you just go to the upper left-hand corner. You’re going to see these two squares here. I click on it and it allows me to compare the original photo. So now I can see what my filter adjustments are going to look like compared to the original. So here’s my original photo. There’s my adjusted, or my filtered photo. Click on it again, to see the original. I want to apply a little more filter to it. So I go over to the right here. Let’s just move this to a hundred percent again. I think this will be good as a black and white photo. Now if I want to see it as color, I click on the square so I can see the original photo. I can see the black and white photo. Once I’ve applied my filter, all I have to do is just click on Done. And now we can see that filter has been applied.

If I want to remove the filter, I can do that. All I have to do is just click on Edit. I go back up under Filters and then I go over to Original. I can also apply a different filter. I really do like the vivid warm. So I click on this. This photo looks good as vivid warm. Now I click on Done and we can see, we have it as vivid warm.

This will also reflect in the thumbnail. If I go back over to all of my thumbnails, I click on the left arrow. We can see that it is still vivid warm.

Now, this also does work with videos. I have this video here. I double click on. I want to apply a filter. I go to Edit, we go back up to Filters here. You can see I have all of my filters. We’re going to go with dramatic warm, and now I’ve just applied that filter. And again, I can adjust how much of that filter is applied.

So that’s how we apply filters to our photos and videos and the Photos app on the Mac. All we have to do is just double click on the photo to open it up. It can be a photo or video. We click on Edit. And then at the top, you click on Filters. From there, you just select the filter you want to apply. And then to the right of that filter, you can adjust how much of that filter is applied to that photo on video. If you no longer want to have that filter applied, you just click on Original, and it’ll remove any filters that you have. You can also compare the original photo or video to your filtered photo and video. And then once you are finished, if you want to edit the photo again and apply different filter, you can do that as well.

So that’s how you apply filters to photos and videos on the Mac.