Review: New Apple Photos app makes fixing, cropping easy
NEW YORK If you're like most people, those hundreds of photos you took on vacation are still on your camera or phone. You shared a handful on Facebook or Instagram, and tell yourself that you'll sift through the others one day.
Procrastinate no more. Apple's new Photos app for Mac computers, available Wednesday as a free software update, makes it easy to organize and edit your pictures. The app, which replaces iPhoto, bundles professional-level tools such as granular color correction into one free consumer package.
Like other free apps such as Google's Picasa, Photos is good for auto-enhancing, cropping and other basic touches such as lightening underexposed shots. But it goes further by also including some of the advanced fine-tuning you'd find in a tool like Adobe Lightroom, which costs $149.
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BETTER-LOOKING SHOTS
If you already use Photos on your iPhone or iPad, you'll see many similarities. Images are organized automatically, partly using location information embedded in the pictures. You can also view photos on a map. The Mac's app goes further in using face-detection technology to group photos by the people in them.
Click on any photo to begin editing. The Enhance button alone will improve many shots. The Adjust tool enhances lighting, color and other attributes separately. Each attribute has an auto button along with a slider you can adjust. Click an arrow to unveil the advanced controls.
I like to adjust something called white balance to compensate for, say, the yellowish glow of indoor lighting. Cameras do this automatically, but not always correctly. In pictures taken on a recent trip, a friend's baby looked too blue, and a waterfall looked too yellow. Photos fixed those quickly, just by hitting "auto." Lightroom usually requires more steps to correct similar issues.
Photos has a lot of cropping options, though my favorite is the auto button. It straightens photos based on the horizon, among other features. My only complaint is it takes a few extra steps to make sure the cropped image retains the original's dimensions. I hope a future update will let me set that as the default.
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Review: New Apple Photos app makes fixing, cropping easy