Edit your images on Mac
Improve the look of your photos and video using the Photos app’s built-in tools
On the whole, the iPhone excels at capturing detail in both shadows and highlights. It can also reproduce accurate colours in various lighting conditions. However, you may still run into exposure problems in contrasting light, leading to shots where the sky is overexposed or the shadows are underexposed. As different light sources produce different colour temperatures, your photos may suffer from cold or warm colour casts as well as green/magenta tints. You may also notice unwanted objects or annoyingly tilted horizons. Fortunately, the Photos app has most of the tools you’ll need to overcome typical pic problems. As well as improving your shot, the Photos app boasts filters that can help to make your images stand out in social media feeds.
The macOS version has more tools than the iOS version, though the iPhone version boasts a unique perspective distortion correction tool (see p28). In this spread, we’ll show you how to use the macOS version of Photos to counteract common problems with colour, tone and composition, as well as produce more creative looks.
You can expand Photo’s functionality by adding third-party extensions. After downloading an app that provides a Photos extension (such as Luminar AI), go to Apple > System Preferences > Extensions. Go to Photos Editing and tick the extension that you want to access in Photos. In Photo’s Edit workspace, click the Extensions icon (…) at the top. Click to launch an extension. You can then use the extra tools provided by the extension, save the results then continue working with the edited image in Photos.
Photos lacks the ability to composite images on multiple layers, so here we’ll also suggest some third-party apps that enable you to perform more creative edits, such as sky replacements.