Extend Photos’ capabilities
Make Photos even better by adding new tools to its repertoire
One of El Capitan’s biggest enhancements to Photos is the ability to use third-party editing tools in it.
This doesn’t work with every picture editor, though; each one must provide an editing extension to make its services available in Photos. To see if any of your apps include one, open System Preferences, click Extensions, then select Photos in the list on the left. Put a check mark in the boxes next to those extensions you want to make available in Apple’s app.
Next, open an individual picture in Photos, click Edit in the toolbar followed by Extensions at the bottom of the list of tools on the right, and choose from the list of those you enabled. (Picking the More item here takes you directly to the Extensions pane to manage them.)
Extensions make certain tools from their parent app – either a specific feature or a subset of the app’s toolset – available without you having to leave Photos at all. So, you might find yourself applying a filter that achieves a particular look in an instant, or using more interactive tools that manipulate images in ways you’d normally expect in apps like Photoshop, Pixelmator or Affinity Photo. Edited versions of pictures created using extensions are synced to iCloud Photo Library (if it’s enabled) and appear on your other devices, just like the originals. The originals are still there, though, and you can revert them on any device, too.