Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to combine
images in the Photos App on your Mac. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a
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So if you want to combine two images, like pick something out of the foreground like yourself
from one and then put it onto the background of another image, you can do it with a variety
of different apps. If you're skilled and have professional apps like PhotoShop or something
similar of course you can do it there. But I'm going to show you how to do it with just what
comes with your Mac. As a matter of fact keeping the photos in the Photos App the whole time.
For instance let's start off with a photo like this. I'm going to take myself out of
this photo and I'm going to put myself onto another photo to make it look like I was
there. Now there are a few different ways to get yourself out of this photo. The simplest
is to use the Copy Subject feature. This was something introduced to macOS Ventura and it's
gotten better in Sonoma. To get to it what you need to do is Control Click, two-finger click,
or right click on the image and then look for Copy Subject. Now this will only be active if
your Mac can find a subject in the photo. So if it is a complex image where you blend in with the
background it may not be able to do it. But you can use Copy Subject here and now you basically
copied the subject to the photo. As a matter of fact look at it closely when I select Copy
Subject you can see it highlights. It has this little line that glows around to show you what
it is going to copy. So you can kind of get a preview of what it is going to copy there.
It's not always going to be perfect and I'll show you ways that you can manually do it in a minute.
But for now we're just going to copy the subject and then we're going to go back out to the Photos
and look for another photo to put this subject on top of. Let's choose this one here. Now,
in order to paste the image on top of this one you'd think you would go to Edit here.
But there is no way to actually edit layers and actually add a layer here in side of Photos.
But that's okay because Photos has the ability to use external editors. If I go to Image and
then Edit With you could see it shows me all the apps where I can edit this photo.
Now a lot of these are things like, for instance, PhotoShop and the like. We're not going to use
any of those. We're going to use what comes with your Mac. So it is built-in. It's the Preview App.
I have it set as the Default here so if I just use Command and Enter it just goes here without
me having to dig into the menus. When I open this image up in Preview any changes I make now in
Preview will be reflected in the Photos App. So, all I'm going to do here is simply Paste. Since I
copied the subject I've got this new layer here. You can even see it behind here in Photos showing
that the change is there. I'm going to put this down here near the bottom and I'm going to make it
a little bit larger. So I'm going to grab one of these blue dots here, like that, and get something
like that. I'll position it where I want. I can see if I look underneath how it looks there
in Photos. But not all apps will actually send information back to photos in real time like that.
But regardless of what you're using if you Save it should send it back there and
then at this point I can Close and now I've got this new version of the photo
in Photos. So very easily I was able to add myself to this image. Now you can't Edit it
once you've actually finished with it in Preview. If I were to go in and Edit With
and choose Preview again this is no longer a separate layer. So I can't do anything with it.
But you can easily start over if you didn't get the result you want because
in Photos it's always nondestructive editing meaning you can always go to
Image and Revert To Original and go back to the original photo and then try again.
Now there are some variations on this. For instance if you weren't able to get what you
wanted with Control Clicking and then using Copy Subject then you can always use the same function
here, Image, Edit With, and Preview. Open this up in Preview but instead of editing the image use
this as a way to get what's there. In Preview you can also Control Click, two-finger click,
or right click and Copy Subject. That will get you the same thing. But you can also go to the
Markup Tools here and then you can use either the Lasso Selection Tool and select whatever you
want or you can use the Smart Lasso and then draw roughly around the subject there. I'm going to do
it like this and then I'm going to go across and just get basically tracing the edges and
then it will do a completely different function. More of a manual function there to try to copy
the subject. Then I can do Command C there, close this without ever having made a change.
So this is untouched. Now I can go into another photo and do the same thing that I did before,
editing in Preview and Pasting what I copied and then having that image over this one here.
So you've got an automatic and a manual way to get the subject. I do want to point out one more
way. If you go in and then do the same thing where you Edit With and in Preview there's a
function in addition to two-finger clicking here and choosing Copy Subject. You can go into Tools
and then you can remove background. When you do that it's going to ask to convert to png,
because it needs to be transparent, and it's going to kind of do the opposite. It's going
to get rid of all of this, instead of copying just this. The advantage to this is you can now go into
this image and you can use the Markup Tools, I'll just use the Lasso Selection, and I can select
an area like this. Once I've selected it press the Delete Key and basically trim more off. So
once I've got this trimmed like I want I can Copy it, Command C, Close. Now notice it did actually
change this image here but no fear because I can just go and Revert To Original for this one and
thenI can go into another image and now I'll edit this and paste in my modified version like that.
Save. Now you can see how it has changed here in the Photos App.
So you can see you can make it really easy just by using Copy Subject on one photo and
then editing the other photo in Preview and pasting it in there. Or you can get
more precise by bringing the first photo into Preview and using a variety of techniques to
get exactly what you want before pasting it into the other. Either way all you need is
Photos and Preview which come with your Mac and you never have to have the photo leave
your Photos Library to do it. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.