Elevate Your Photos Skills: Lift Subjects and Create Composites

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In this video, we’re going to look at how we can copy a subject out of a photo in the Photos app on the Mac, and then how we can paste that subject into another photo. Now, if you’re not familiar with who I am, I’m Dan watching from Dan’s tutorials, I create easy to follow video tutorials for the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. You can find them all at Dan’s tutorials.com. Alright, let’s get back to why you are here. Let’s see how we can copy a subject out of the Photos app on the Mac, and then paste it into another photo. Let’s go over to my Mac.

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Now the first thing you’ll need to do is make sure that you’re running Mac OS 13.2 or later, the ability to lift the subject out of a photo was not initially released with Mac OS Ventura, what you need to do is go up to your Apple menu here. And then you go to About this Mac. And you need to make sure that this says 13.2 point something needs to be after 13.2. If you have this version, you’ll be able to lift the subject of a photo, let’s see how we can lift the subject out of a photo. The way that we do that on a Mac, let’s go over to my photos here. The way that we do that on a Mac is we need to control click on this to get our contextual menu and an iPad and an iPhone, what we do is we just tap and hold on the subject and you’ll see a glow that goes around the image the subject, and then you can copy that. But on the Mac, what we need to do is hold down the CTRL key and I click and then what you’re going to see here is copy subject. And watch the photo when I move my cursor over top of copy subject, it’s going to highlight the subject but then myself and darken the background, I’m going to actually move this over to the right here. And now I’m going to click on birth here. And I Ctrl, click hold down the control key. And then watch what happens when I move my cursor overtop of copy subject. Beth and I are going to get brighter, and the background is going to get darker. This basically shows us what it’s going to copy. So we can see that it’s going to copy Beth and myself. And that’s what I want. So now just copy this. And what I’m able to do is paste this into another app, I could paste this into a message. So that’s how we copy the subject out of a photo in the Photos app. Now, I mentioned that what we can do with this subject is added to another photo. How do we do that? Well, we do this through Pages. Actually, you can do this with any app that does layering and Pages is a perfect example for this. It does a great job for what we need to do here. What I want to do is

2:44
take this image here, this is going to be my background image. I want to add Bethan myself to that, and I want to add this Jeep to it. How can I do that? Well, the first thing we need to do is we need to build our base. So we need to create a bottom photo, what we’re going to add our photos to our subjects to so I double click on this, and what I’m going to do is just use my contextual menu. And I’m going to copy this, I just hold down the CTRL key and we get a contextual menu, and I copy it. It’s now copied. Now what I need to do is go over to Pages and open up a new document. So I go to Pages here, I open up a new document.

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And the document I want is just a blank document, we want to make sure that it is a page layout document. So let’s just go with this blank landscape. When I click on it, you’re gonna see that I have the cursor there, it is not a page layout type document, we want to turn it into a page layout type document, pretty easy to do this right now. It’s a word processing document. So what I need to do is just go up under file here, and you’re going to see convert to Page Layout. So I selected this, and now confirm it. It is a page layout type document. Now why do I want to do that? Well, when you have a word processing type document, it’s really designed for word processing, like reports, not necessarily designed for images. A page layout type document is designed for images, we can put images wherever we want, we can add tags, we can add blocks, you’re basically just creating your own page layout, you are not creating a report. So it just makes it a little bit easier. You could do this in word processing type documents, but you really want to change it to a page layout type document. All right, so now I have this blank canvas here. Or remember I copied that background image. So now what I need to do is just paste so I’ll just go up under here. And we go to paste and we have my base image here.

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So now what I need to do is go and add Beth and myself and the jeep. So how do we do that? Well, we copy the subject. So now let’s go back over to my photos app. And let’s just go and add that then myself first. So I double click on it, I hold down the control key.

5:11
I copy the subject. It just copied Bethan myself. And now when I go back over to my Pages document, and I paste, we can see we have Beth and myself there. So now all I need to do is just reposition this, I can make it smaller by clicking on these white squares. put myself down here in the lower right hand corner. And now I want to add the jeep. So I got back to myself here, let’s go and add the jeep. So I go back over to my photos,

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I open up my jeep, I Ctrl. Click on it, we have copy subject. And now it’s going to copy the jeep. I paste in there, it’s a jeep. So now I resize this. And we have the Jeep in there. So now what I want to do is just kind of reposition this make it look a little bit better. So what I’m going to do is make the Jeep a little bit smaller here, we can see that it has faded here. So I want to have that just go down a little bit. And the key to making this really work well is you want to have everything contained within the background photo. Well, we have these tires here outside of the background photo, we have my arm here outside of the background photo, how can I get those into the photo, we just have to crop it. So now what I do is I double click on the Jeep, you’re gonna see that I have these black squares here, when these black squares show what we’re able to do is grab those and crop so you’re gonna see that it’s not making my jeep any smaller, but it is cropping it. So now I can place it right on the edge there. And when I click outside, we can see that the tires are just cut off there. That’s what I want. Now let’s do the same thing with myself here. I double click on it, we have these black squares. And then I just drag this over to the right and click on Done.

7:18
And now we can see Beth and myself along with the Jeep. Now the Jeep looks a little bit larger here and it’s covering up bat. So let’s go and make this a little bit smaller. Or what I could do because we are layering this let’s make it a little bit larger.

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What we can do is put Bethan myself in front. Remember, this is a layer so it’s like a deck of cards, we can rearrange these. So now let’s put Bethan myself in front of the Jeep. So I click on it, I Ctrl. Click on it. And then you’re going to see Bring to Front. When I do that, what it’s going to do is bring Beth in front of the Jeep there. So now I have my new photo there. I want to add this to my photos app right now it is three different pieces. How can I do that? Well, we can use preview for that every Mac has preview, all I have to do is just select everything here now. So I just go up under Edit. And we go over to select all, it’s going to select all three items there. But then myself, the jeep and the background. Select All, I could also use Command Eight. And now we can see that everything is selected. Now I just need to copy it.

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And when we open up preview, I’m going to go down to my preview here. When we open up preview, what I’m able to do is under file here, create a new document from my clipboard. Watch what happens when I do this.

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There is my photo, and it is a photo I can’t move these around, I can’t grab them. This is a photo. So now what I’m able to do is save this into my photos app. So I go up to the share icon.

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And all I have to do is just go to add to photos. And this photo now is in my library, you’re going to see my new photo right here. And remember, this is actually three different photos. Beth and myself came from one photo, the Jeep came from another one and then we have my background.

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So that is how we can copy the subject out of a photo with the Photos app. This is new and Mac OS, Ventura 13.2. And then in addition to that, how we can create a new photo from those subjects. We use Pages and preview. So we use Pages to layer all of our different items and we can crop them we can reposition them. We can resize them we get a chest how we want. Once we do that, we just have to copy all that and then open up the preview app and create a new document from our clipboard when we do that, we’re able to save that to our photos app. And then we have a new photo with our subjects that we’ve copied from other photos. So that’s how you can copy the subject out of photos in the Photos app, as well as paste those subjects into a new photo. And then save that to your photos app. We do this through Pages and preview.