Compare Edited Photos and Videos to the Original

In this video, I’m going to show you how you can easily compare your edited photo or video with the original photo or a video when you make an edit. What you might want to do is compare that to the original, to see if you actually like the edit, there might be some real subtle differences that you want to look at and you want to compare it. Let’s see how we do this. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I am in my Photos app and let’s swipe up here. I’m going to I go to my album here in Mexico. I have this photo here. Let’s go ahead and double click on it, and now let’s edit this photo.

The first thing I’m going to do is use auto enhance. When we use auto enhance, the Photos app will take a look at the photo or video and enhance it based on different algorithms. To use auto enhance, we just go to the upper right-hand corner and click on the magic wand. So now it enhanced this photo. What I would like to do is compare this to the original. I want to see the original and see what enhancements were made. How can we compare this to the original while when we’re using auto enhance? All we have to do is just click on the magic wand again and it removes any enhancements. So that’s how we can compare edits from my photo or video when we use auto enhance, we just click on auto enhance to enhance it and then click on it again to remove it.

Now, what about photos that we edit ourselves? Well, let’s go ahead and edit this and see how I can compare it to the original. I go over to Edit here, and what I’m going to do is bring out a little bit more detail in here, a little bit more definition. So I’m just going to drag the slider over here to the right. This is an adjustment. And as I drag it to the right, you’re going to see I have a little bit more detail in that photo.

So now what I want to do is compare this to the original. Well, all we need to do is just go to the upper left hand corner. You’re going to see we have these two squares. One of them is hollow and one of them is solid. This is our compare button. To compare my edited photo to the original, what I do is I click and hold on this. As long as I am holding it, it’s going to show me the original. To view the edited version, I let go, and it shows me the edited version. So on the track pad, which is what I have, I just click and hold. If I’m using a mouse, what I do is I just press the mouse button. And as long as I’m holding it, it’s going to show me the original. I let go, it shows me the edited version. So I added a little bit too much definition with this. So now I just go back over to my adjustment here and let’s just go and back this down a little. That’s probably a little bit better, but I want to compare this again to the original. I go back up to my compare tool here. I click and hold, I’m looking at the original. I let go, I’m looking at my modified version. This looks pretty good to me. To save it, we just go over to Done and then it applies those changes.

It works the same way with videos. I’m going to go over to my videos album here, and we’re going to take a look at this video here, I double click on it. And now if I want to apply auto enhance, I click on this and it’s going to automatically enhance it. I want to compare to the original, I click on it again. It turns it off. We can see that the greens are a little bit brighter, but now let’s say I wanted to back that down a little bit. It’s a little bit too bright. So now what I need to do is make further adjustments. So I go over to Edit here. I go over to my Coloer, I need to back down on that a little bit. So I just click on this. And now I just backed down on this a little bit. I want to compare this to the original. I just go up to my compare tool here in the toolbar, I click on it and we can see it’s a little more dull. The greens aren’t as bright. I let go. The greens are a little bit brighter. It’s just a subtle adjustment that I made. This does work with filters as well.

So that’s how you can compare your edits to your original photo and video in the Photos app. If you use an auto enhance, you just turn the auto enhance on and off. If you’ve applied adjustments or applied any filters while you’re editing your photo or a video, you go to the upper left hand corner and click on the compare tool. When you click on it, you click and hold on it, you’re going to see the original. Let go, you’ll see your adjusted photo or video.

So that’s how you can compare your edited photo or video to the original photo or video in Photos on the Mac.