From the course: Photos for macOS Big Sur and iPhone Essential Training

Expanding capability with editing extensions - Apple Photos Tutorial

From the course: Photos for macOS Big Sur and iPhone Essential Training

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Expanding capability with editing extensions

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- [Instructor] One of the complaints I've heard over the years is that "Photos isn't sophisticated enough for me, I need more tools." Okay, let me show you something right now, because I use Photos for some pretty wild things. All right, here is a shot that I like to do. I like to do infrared. I think infrared is fun. I have a dual spectrum camera. And I play with this a lot. And I play with it, yes, in Photos. How do I do that? Well, let's go to edit mode and let me show you a few tricks. So yes, we have all of these and they're nice, okay. But we also have these little three dots up here. This is where our editing extensions live. Now you have to add these yourselves, and you get 'em in the Mac App Store. Markup comes with it, but these other ones, and I'm going to show you two in particular, I'm going to show you RAW Power and Pixelmator Pro. They're both very affordable. You buy them, you install them, and then they show up here in this menu. Let's start with RAW Power right there. So you're still working within the ecosystem of Photos. In other words, any changes I make here in this editing extension, save back to my Photos library, and we'll actually do that. So you have all of these really great tools here. Look at all this stuff that you have. Channel Mixer is very important to infrared work. Okay, I have that right here. In fact, it's in my list. Let me show it to you. So I'm going to work on the red channel and I can play with this adjustment like there and we're going to take blue. We're going to play with blue, just a bit. Isn't that cool? Look at that. Channel Mixers are fun, especially with infrared. And let me see. So we go to the blue channel. The idea is that in the blue channel, you adjust the red and maybe downplay the blue a little bit. Look at that. Okay, I can do this in Photos. I can turn on and off that adjustment. See, isn't that a nice adjustment? Really well. Okay, I also have other things in Photos that you just don't see other places like I have built in LUTs, look up tables. Check this out. Let's go down here. There's Acros. Look up tables are really fun. They're very smart. They're very sophisticated. And you can even add your own. Isn't that wild? I just love these, completely different looks, very sophisticated, right here in Photos. All right. I'm not going to apply any of those right now. I just want you to see that they're there. Okay, and then if I want to do before and after, just hit the M key. Let's take a look at Pixelmator Pro. We'll go ahead and save these changes right here. Now we're back in Photos, just like that. Saved to iCloud, all that good stuff. One more, Pixelmator Pro. Tell me there's not enough tools available to you in the Photos ecosystem. Look at all this stuff, tons of stuff here, color monochrome. You want to play with that? We got that here. Fade, channel mixer, right? Just like we were just doing an RAW Power. Invert. So if you scan negatives and you want to invert them to positives, you can do that here. Replace color, curves, levels, selective color. And that's just some of it, look at. These are all tools here in Pixelmator Pro. For instance, if you want to repair something, they have an excellent repair brush here. It just goes on and on. There's tons of stuff here. We'll go ahead and cancel out of this. We'll discard those changes, whatever changes we made. And now we're back in the Photos interface. These are just two of the editing extensions that are available. These are two of my favorites right now but don't tell me that you can't do serious work in Photos. You can. Explore those editing extensions, install the ones that you like and just get to it and make some beautiful stuff.

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