Make Selective Color Adjustments

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can make selective color adjustments in the Photos app on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now, if we look at this photo here, you’re going to see that Beth is wearing an orange shirt. What I would like to do is desaturate that. It’s a little bit bright. But I don’t want to de saturate the entire photo. The way that I would do this is through Selective Color. I basically can select a color and then make adjustments to only that color.

How do we do that? We go up to Edit in the upper right-hand corner, and then we go over to Adjust. From here, you’re going to see Selective Color. Now, there is no automatic setting on here because the first thing we need to do is select what color we want to make adjustments to. To do that, we go over to the left. We have the little carrot here, and from here we select what color we want.

Now if you look here, you’re going to see I have available to me, red, yellow, green, a light blue, dark blue, and a pink, but Beth’s shirt here is orange. If I go make any one of these other color adjustments, that might affect other parts of that photo. Well what we can do is select that orange shirt of Beth’s as my color. How do we do that? We go over to this eyedropper here. I click on this and then I click on her shirt. So I click, and now we can see we have orange here. So we do not have to stick with the standard colors that the Photos app provides us. We can use the eyedropper to select our own.

Now, once we select that color down below, you’re going to see we have our different adjustments. I can adjust the hue, saturation, luminance, and range. So you want to use a combination of these to make some adjustments. Now, I just want to desaturate it without desaturating the background. So I’m just going to go to Saturation here, and I drag this over to the left and watch what happens to her shirt. It’s getting de-saturated, but it’s not necessarily affecting the rest of the phone.

Let’s take another look at this. I’m going to click on Done. We’re going to go to this motorcycle here. I double click on it. I have the air filter here. This air filter is roughly the same color as the logo here, as well as the wrapping around the exhaust, and at the road. When I make an adjustment, it’s going to make an adjustment to all of these colors. So it does not localize it to just this one area here. It affects the entire photo. So let’s make an adjustment to this color here. I click on Edit. It goes to Adjust by default. And then I go over to Selective Color.

Again, we do not have the right color here. So now I go over to the eyedropper. I click on the brown, and now we can see we have that color. I’m going to increase the saturation where this one, I go over to saturation here and it’s increasing the saturation of that air filter. But also in addition to that, you’re going to see it increase the saturation to the exhaust wrapping as well as the logo and the road. So again, it doesn’t localize it to a specific area to does apply to the entire folder.

Let’s take a look at how this works with videos. Works basically the same way, but it doesn’t apply to just a specific frame, it does apply it to the entire video. I’m going to click on Done. Let’s go over to my Media Types and I’m going to select a video. So I go over to Videos here. We have Beth zip-lining with that same orange shirt. So I double click on it. It doesn’t matter where I am in the video, because it does apply to every frame in that video. So now I just go up to Edit here.. It automatically goes to my Adjustments. I go over to my Selective Color, and again, instead of choosing one of the predefined colors, I go over to my eyedropper. And from here, I just click on her shirt. We can see, we have the orange and now I just desaturate it a little bit, and it does apply to the entire video. You’re going to see it is destaurated even further in that video.

If I no longer like what I have there, I can go and click on little check mark, just like with any other adjustment, and removes any adjustments that I’ve made.

So that’s how we can make adjustments to selective colors in the Photos app on the Mac. We can do this with both photos and videos. When we make an adjustment, it does apply to the entire photo or entire video, it does not localize it to a specific area. To make an adjustment. We go to our Adjustment tools. Once we click on Edit, we go to Selective Color. We can choose one of the predefined colors, or we can use the eye dropper to select our own. From there we go and make our adjustments, including adjusting the hue, saturation, luminance, and range. Once we make our adjustments, if it’s a video, it’ll apply it to every frame in that video. If it’s a photo of just applies to the entire photo.

So that’s how we make selective color adjustments in the Photos app on the Mac.