Apple has offered a Retouch tool in the macOS Photos app for several releases. This brush-like tool lets you “paint” over an area or in spots and have Photos interpolate detail, removing noise and dust.
Starting in macOS 15.1 Sequoia, however, some readers who rely on Retouch noticed it disappeared. That’s because Apple added a more powerful but still in-progress replacement feature: Clean Up. Clean relies on Apple Intelligence, the company’s beta machine-learning product. You need an M1 or later Apple silicon Mac.
If you’re using an M-series Mac, when you double-click an image and click Edit, and click Adjust in the button at the top of the editing window, Retouch no longer appears in the right-hand adjustment list. Instead, a new Clean Up button is available at the top of the screen. Click that, and you can adjust a Size slider and click, circle, or paint an area on a photo.
Clean Up seems to work best on small areas and in removing certain kinds of distractions, like power lines, people in the background of a photo, or objects. When I drag or circle larger areas instead of painting, the results are quite poor compared to the control offered in Retouch.
Retouch isn’t perfect, but it seems to smooth out dust from the top-right of an iPad mini without being too obstrusive (left). Circling an area with Clean Up removed some dust with no trace, but then made other splotches more extreme (right).
Foundry
The trouble is, you can’t opt to return to Retouch. Even if you disable Apple Intelligence in > System Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri, Clean Up still remains in Photos, and Retouch is still missing. While Apple Intelligence remains in beta, you would think Apple would offer a switch between the two or keep both in place. Unfortunately, it’s provided a dubious “upgrade” that you’ll have to suffer through (or revert to 15.0 Sequoia).
This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Martin.
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