HOW TO Draw and edit with Markup

1 Pick your app

Many of Apple’s own apps are Markupenabled – for example, in Photos if you edit an image you’ll see an icon of a circle with three dots in it. Click that and you’ll see the icon for Markup, which is a circle with a pencil inside it.

2 Markup quickly

The fastest way to access Markup is from your desktop or inside a folder: select it and tap the Spacebar to bring up the Quick Look window with your file inside it. If it’s an image you’ll see the picture. Click the Markup icon.

3 Use the tools

The toolbar at the top provides fast access to drawing, shape, text and formatting tools. Here we’re going to use the Shape icon to pick a speech bubble. That’ll appear in the middle of the window where we can resize and move it.

4 Style your shape

Use the border and fill icons to change the appearance of the selected shape. Here we’re going for a vivid yellow. If your Mac has a Touch Bar, you’ll see the options replicated there, enabling you to adjust things like brush size.

5 Add some text

You can add text using the text box icon top left, or by clicking inside a shape and typing. Markup remembers previous settings; if last time you used huge fonts, they’ll be huge here. Use ç+A to select and the text icon to format it.

6 Get magnifying

One of our favourite Markup tools is the magnifier, which you’ll find at the bottom right of the shapes pop-out. This magnifies the area underneath it. Use the blue control point to resize it and the green one to zoom in or out.

7 Sign your name

We’re often asked to sign documents that we want to return digitally, and with Markup you can do that with your Trackpad (if it supports Force Touch), camera or iPhone or iPad. Here we’ve used our iPad to scribble a big signature.

8 Move your mark

You can move and resize your signature like any other image, and Markup will remember it for later. In this screenshot we’ve also used the text box icon to add two little blocks of text, so we can add our name and date to the form.

9 Add bits to PDFs

You don’t need a dedicated PDF editor to highlight, annotate or scribble on even very big PDF documents: Markup’s tools are available for them too. Here we’re adding a comment to a PDF that someone else has shared with us.