Boost Photos’ editing tools

Add Affinity Photo’s image manipulation tools to Apple’s photo manager

REQUIRES

Affinity Photo, OS X 10.11 or later

you will learn

How to add Affinity Photo’s controls to Apple’s Photos app

IT WILL TAKE

10 minutes

The benefit of using an app such as Lightroom, or Apple’s now-discontinued Aperture, is that you get all the tools you need to manage, edit and export photos in one place. Neat and tidy, right? What might not be immediately obvious is that Apple’s own Photos app provides you with a surprisingly powerful set of so-called “roundtripping” tools.

Roundtripping is the practice of opening an image in one app, exporting it directly to another app to make changes, and then returning those changes to the original image in the first app. Photos’ version of this uses Extensions, which are tools supplied by other apps that you use within Photos’ own window.

Whether you round-trip an image or simply use an extension within Photos, you can get hold of far more advanced image editing tools than are available in Photos ordinarily, while continuing to take advantage of Photos’ other features, giving you the best of both worlds.

Adding new extensions to Photos is easy. Once you’ve installed an app that includes one or more of them – Affinity Photo, Aurora HDR or Luminar, for example – open a picture in Photos’ editing mode. On the right you’ll see Photos’ own editing tools. Click Extensions at the bottom, and pick More if you don’t see your app’s extensions in the list. This takes you to the Extensions pane in System Preferences, which lists all the photo-editing ones on your Mac. Check the boxes of those you want to use.

In Affinity Photo’s case, Extensions work in two different ways: most of them make tools from Affinity Photo available directly within Photos’ interface. “Edit in,” however, passes your image to Affinity Photo. The edited version is re-imported into Photos when you save and close it.