Retouch your Photos to Remove Blemishes and Objects

In this video, I’m going to go over a specific adjustment that we have-retouch. With retouch what we’re able to do is retouch minor parts of a photo. Let’s take a look at retouch in the Photos app on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I’m looking at this photo here, and if we look you’re going to see we have a couple of people in the water. What I would like to do is take out those people. We do this with our retouch tool. I’m going to zoom in here a little bit. I have a trackpad, so I just pinch to zoom in, and we can see those two people.

So how do we retouch this? Well it is an adjustment. So he first need to edit our photo and then we need to go to our adjustments. So I go over to Edit in the upper right-hand corner, and then I make sure I’m looking at my Adjustments. Over on the right, we have all of our different tools. I talked about this in an earlier lesson, but one of these tools that are available to us is Retouch. With Retouch, what we’re able to do is retouch small portions of our photos. Now we can retouch larger portions, but it really doesn’t look that good. This is really used for smaller portions of a photo.

Now, the first thing that I always recommend doing when you retouch is zoom into the photo itself. So I’m going to zoom in here to these people here. I’m zoomed in. Now, what I want to do is I want to remove them. The next thing we need to do is set our brush size. We do have a specific brush size here for our retouch tool. I could make this brush size quite large. But when you do that, the results are not that good. You really want to make that brush size small. So now I’m going to go back over to my brush size here and I’m going to drag it and make it smaller.

Now I have a nice brush size here. I can just retouch the people. We don’t want to retouch outside of what we want to remove to retouch it. All I do is just drag in. And now when we look at that photo, we can see that person is no longer there. Let’s go over to this person here, the brush sizes a little bit larger than what I want to remove, which is perfect.

I just click and drag and now they are no longer there. So now when I zoom out, those people are no longer there. I retouched the photo and removed them., if you go with a large brush size, I’m going to go over to the boat here and I’m going to retouch this with a larger brush size. You’re going to see what can happen. So I go back over to my retouch tool. I just drag this over and we’re going to make it quite large because it’s a larger boat or larger object in my photo. I go over here and now when I click on this to remove it, watch what happens. You can actually see that I’ve retouched this. If we look at the horizon, you can see that it has been retouched.

This is why we want to go with a smaller brush size. That’s also why I like to zoom in. So now I’m going to undo that. I just go up under Edit in the menu bar. We go over to undo. Let’s go to a smaller brush size. It’s about the size of the boat there. I zoom in and now I just retouch where that boat is and we can see it’s a little bit better.

It’s not perfect because that object was quite large for the photo. Again, the retouch tool doesn’t really work for larger objects, but it does do a pretty good job. And if you don’t like what you’ve done, what you can always do is go back under Edit, and then undo and then retouch it again. And of course, along with any other adjustment, once you make that adjustment, if you don’t like you can just revert back to the original.

So that’s our Retouch tool that we have available to us in the Photos app on the Mac. With Retouch, what we’re able to do is retouch portions of a photo. This does not work with videos. What I recommend doing is zooming into the photo and then make the the brush size as small as possible. Just click over what you want to retouch. Don’t click over too much. Once you are done, the Photos app will retouch your photo. If you do not like what you see, you can always undo it or just go back to the original.

So that’s our retouch tool we have available to us in the Photos app on the Mac.