Starting with the Enhance command

- Let's get started with the enhance command. This is a one-click adjustment that's really worth trying on just about every image. When you're viewing your images, the enhance command will do its best to modify the images. Let's start here with this one and we'll double click and then engage editing mode. You'll notice when I click Enhance that small adjustments were made to that image. We can revert it to the original and in this case, not much needed to change.

I'll press the right arrow key though to go to the next image, and when I click Enhance, you see again that it did its best to make some changes. But Photos doesn't always understand what needs to be enhanced. With many images, as we click through this, you'll see that Enhance will brighten up certain areas. If we toggle that back and forth, you see that it did brighten up the overall candle flames. And in the case of this image, it did properly fix sort of a color cast that was adding a little bit of a reddish tone to the skin tones.

That was caused by the sun reflecting off the wall. Now that's a bit more neutralized. On other images though, like this one here, while it does make a small change, it's not necessarily intelligent enough to differentiate between the different areas of the photo. If you have an image that's essentially well developed, clicking Enhance will try to fix the color cast and improve the overall contrast of the image. In these cases here, I'm just using the left or right arrow keys to step through.

And with some of these images, Enhance makes a nice adjustment. As you see there, a good overall increase in contrast and saturation. You'll note if you click the Adjust tab that what Enhance essentially did is guess. It tried its best to run the auto values for both color and light. If we revert that back to the original and click it, you'll see that's it's really a one-click wizard and what it's trying to do is analyze the image and fix it.

Now this is a jump start to getting the right values and it does a pretty good job of fixing things like the black point as well as potentially compensating for any sort of color cast issues. As we take a look here, let's revert this to the original and click, you see it did a nice overall job of balancing out the saturation and contrast as well as splitting the difference between highlights and shadows. But with this one-click adjustment, it's rarely the end of what you're going to need to do.

Click the Enhance button to see the quickly changed image. If it's moving in the right direction, use those adjustments to help you out. It's going to guess which sliders need to be moved. And while you can refine those sliders, this might help narrow down which ones you should actually adjust. By letting Photos make its suggestion of which sliders need manipulation, you can use this as a solid starting point. If you click the Enhance button though and the image looks worse, simply revert it back to the original state and take a more manual approach.