From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

Using external editors with Photos for macOS - Photos for OS X Tutorial

From the course: Enhancing Your Images with Photos for macOS

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Using external editors with Photos for macOS

- If you have other photo software, it's pretty easy to target those applications seamlessly from Photos for macOS. And there's two ways to do this. With the photo open, you could choose to send it to another program. If you choose Image, Edit With, you'll see a list of photo software available on your computer. However, this is just a handoff, and doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to come back into your library. While it's convenient, it just really is a one-way relationship. Instead, I suggest you add the extension we mentioned earlier. From the edit menu, you could choose to add the external editors extension. This allows you to see all of the external editors in the same way, but now what you can do is simply round trip it. You can even convert to a high quality TIFF along the way to minimize any detail loss. Now what I'll do is send this to Photoshop for a moment, and send the file. The image opens up. Let's go ahead and remove some things. I'm going to make a basic selection here with the Object Selection tool. And lasso around the car. It selected part of it, and let's go ahead and choose this the rest of the way with the Quick Selection tool. And we can just drag through to make a decent selection. I'll make that a little bit bigger. Modify. Expand. And we'll go out 10 pixels. And now, let's choose one of the great things about Photoshop, Content-Aware Fill. This is going to look around and come up with new pixels. Now, you can eliminate where it looks. I don't need it looking up here at the building, in fact. I just want it to look at the surrounding fence nearby. And what it will do is use those pixels to come up with new ones. And you see it generated a new pattern. If we want, we can paint to add to this. I'll just click the plus brush. And I can paint in some new areas. And it's going to select and generate. You see the results here on the right. Let's make that a little bit bigger. Not bad. And I can tell it to do a higher quality match. It really does a great job. I like that, and I'll click OK. And you see that it removed the car from the scene. Now, you can continue to work. I'll just grab the Clone Stamp tool, hold down the Option or Alt key to click, and I can get a smaller brush, and just brush that in. Let's use the option here called Aligned. And it becomes pretty simple. There we go. And we're just painting that in for the railing. Nice and simple. And now I've got a clean railing and an organic pattern to hide things. We can use other great tools, such as Upright. For example, I'll choose to run Adobe Camera Raw as a filter. And from within that, I can do perspective correction. We'll just choose the Perspective Correction here. And invoke the Auto Balance for Upright, and it straightens objects in the scene. You can also further enhance this and tilt the image as needed until you get a good overall image. There we go. Looks good. And while we're at it, we might as well just fix a few things. Let's pull down those highlights. And put a little Clarity in and Dehaze. I can now save the image. And click Save Changes. You'll notice that it brought the changes in. It automatically captured the results from Photoshop, and there's the new pattern on the bottom, the removed car, and the fixed perspective. We can then, of course, continue to work inside here and do anything we want with the tools inside of Photos for macOS. What's great here is you can jump into other editing tools as needed and easily handoff between them. Now, that external editing extension is free, and what I like about it is it just makes it simple to hand an image off to, really, any tool on your hard drive. You'll see that several different image editors are supported, and this allows you a simple workflow. I suggest this, because it makes it much easier, and eliminates the step of having to import things back in. Plus, the changes are non-destructive, so if you ever need to, you can always choose to revert to original, and it still has the connection between the two. Let's undo. This workflow is so much better than exporting a file, opening it up, and then having to reimport it. Because all of the edits are connected with your original source file. You get all the benefits we learned about earlier of being able to revert to the original, as well as continue the editing process inside of Photos for macOS, or by handing off to another application. Plus, the best part of this external editing application, it's free. It allows you to use any other tool on your system. That is great for photo editing.

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