From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

Combining filters with adjustments for precise control - Photos for OS X Tutorial

From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

Start my 1-month free trial

Combining filters with adjustments for precise control

“

- In our previous example, we took a look at filters. Now they were added to mostly end-processed images where we just added 'em as is or using the Auto Enhance command, but what's quite nice is is you can actually use these and then refine the results afterwards with the Adjustments command. Let's continue working on this image here. I just applied the noire style, and I'll go to Adjust. Now what you'll notice is that we can continue to use auto adjustments or make refinements. For example, lifting the shadows here and boosting the definition should come in handy to get a more dramatic black and white. I can also choose an auto curve value, and go after a specific area so we can lift those shadows a bit. You see how that lifts up the middle quite nicely, and in fact I'll pull down these a little bit more. I have to be careful not to overdo it, or you'll see posterization, but that's a nice little change there that improved the dynamic range. Remember, all of this is ultimately up to you. And as you notice, making changes to things like color contrast and saturation will actually affect the results of the filters that you're using. You could play with these to continue to refine the overall look. Remember, when this is all done, you can still use this as a quick look. Just stay in Edit mode and right click on the image and choose Copy Adjustments. You can now go to another image that you want to process. I'll just press the space bar here and choose another photograph. Let's go here to this hawk. I'll go into Edit mode and paste those adjustments. Now in this particular case, the subject matter's pretty different, but a lift to the shadows and a recovery of the highlights, and we're back in business. And you see that this is quite simple to refine and reuse the looks. This way you can still get that sped-up workflow, but don't have to keep redoing things. Let's try a slightly different image here. Go into Edit mode and paste those adjustments, and you see they instantly applied. But again you are free image by image to refine options just to improve the overall effect, but you shouldn't have to go through as many changes as you try to dial in the quick overall look.

Contents