Apple retouch tool gone after update to Sequioa 15.1

I made some corrections to above, including "I communicated with Apple Support" (not commented), etc. Also, Retouch was the ONLY Photos tool eliminated with the Sequoia software update. And Clean Up was the only addition. The bottom line for me is the most logical conclusion is that Retouch was eliminated (with no way to downgrade) to force us to use Clean Up even if doesn't actually work to "Clean Up" pictures - and it definitely doesn't work to naturally retouch them. **'s repixelation can be great if you want to eliminate an object on a simple background. That's not something I often do, whereas I retouched at least half of my photos quickly and beautifully. And even when using it on simple backgrounds with brighter colors, I've still experienced very obvious repixelation with **.

Eliminating Retouch and only Retouch makes us use Clean Up (until we won't anymore) or makes us pay for apps to do what Retouch did or to switch to a whole other application. However, based on the very anomalous lack of communication and promotion (before, during, and after) with both Apple consumers and employees about this significant change to a firmly established and very effective Apple-designed Photos tool, I personally believe the intention is to make consumers use Clean Up. Otherwise, why intentionally eliminate the very much used, effective, intuitively designed (not AI), and elegant Retouch? Why not just add Clean Up to the various Photos tools and PROMOTE IT as another Photos tool for Apple's loyal customer base? Why the silence about it, the deletion of posts in this Community about it, etc.?

iPapa wrote:

Completely agree with the fine folks here.

CLEAN UP creates large pixelated "blobs" on the image, thus rendering the function useless. Retouch allowed a lot more finesse and without it I'm forced to look for alternatives.

...

This is a new security feature. It makes it easy to blur faces, when we share photos with people in them. Just click on a face and it will be blurry and pixellated.

I found that I can avoid to trigger the pixellation by zooming in on the face as far as possible. Then I can remove freckles or other blemishes. But this has previously been much easier with the cloning tool, that is gone now.

lincoophedley wrote:

actually, the clean up brush does work. you can zoom in and draw a circle with your finger and it's fills in the background very nicely. I stand corrected:-)

It should work on a Mac as well, but there are two problems. I cannot zoom in far enough when I am using clean up, the brush is too coarse. And it does not work when trying to clean up blemishes on a face. when I try to remove freckles, they will be replaced by other freckles. We need the cloning brush of the old Retouche tool to be able to clone from a clear area without freckles.

kbastian, I am so glad you submitted feedback as well. And everything you pointed out to them reinforces why Apple's elimination of ReTouch was unnecessary and also not done to improve Photos for Apple consumers. They have made Photos notably less useful by eliminating such an established, effective, and much used tool for no legitimate reason and for no reason in the interest of Apple consumers. I, too, hope everyone submits feedback to Apple.

But individuals with Apple definitely read this thread. They are VERY quick to delate posts that raise issues Apple does not want raised. This has been done in silence and without responding to anyone's messages to support for a reason - one that Apple does not want to address with its customers. Also, they leave up messages that love on Clean Up even if they are not accurate. So they are reading this thread. At some point after we are no longer guinea pigs, I've been hoping they will return ReTouch, but based on their wall of silence, my hope has diminished. Based on my second paragraph, this likely will be deleted, but I hope not.

It is truly a colossal blunder. The workaround for me is that I have Luminar Neo installed which has a Photos plugin. Neo does lots of great stuff and it includes an erase brush which is very good. A bit more hassle than just grabbing the old Photos brush, but it's what I will do for now.

Thought about migrating fully to Lightroom as it does have a lot of great features, but it's not cheap and I like the way Photos works within the whole ecosystem.

Oh brother. I downloaded Sequoia 15.1 yesterday. This morning I opened Photos all set to remove some bits of dust from my B&W neg and..... NOTHING ! I clicked on Clean Up and almost immediately wanted to get rid of it. Apparently that's not possible. It would seem that Clean Up will rid your negs of unwanted people but not dust spots or errant scratches. And Red Eye--- what use is that to me? I'm strictly a B&W photographer. Photos editing has always given me exactly what I needed ---- until now. I can't believe Apple is so short-sighted.

I've downloaded a free app called Moravi. We'll see. And, I've sent a feedback email to Apple just in case a human might actually read it. I even talked to AppleCare to ask if it were possible to go back to Sonoma, where everything worked just the way it like it. Not really feasible without intercession at the Apple Store, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Bad Apple. Bad !

Yep. Clean up is nothing like retouch. Retouch made smooth touch ups without disturbing the pixels (I am no tech expert, so my wording may be off). Clean up alters all around it - even at the smallest setting. It literally alters - and not in a good way. It does not retouch. If you only want to eliminate an item from a very simple background, clean up is fine for that. But it completely alters photos that you simply want to elegantly and smoothy touch up. There is absolutely nothing elegant or smooth about clean up. And they are two separate things - not a replacement or equivalency. Apple also did not even tell the Support staff it was eliminating Retouch. Bottom line = Apple can retain the incorrectly named “Clean up” if it wants. But Apple needs to restore “Retouch,” which works as intended and is much more useful than it’s apparent attempt to use Apple customers to beta test the poorly designed Clean Up.

Still frustrated at not finding a suitable substitute for the lamented retouch brush. So based on something I read, a fellow was saying that he used Clean Up to eliminate dust specks from a neg, I gave it another try.

First I closed the "circle" size way down, moved my cursor (the usual arrow, not like the old retouch circle) to a dust speck and clicked. What happened, to my amazement, is that the spot glowed just like when someone beams off the Enterprise, for a second after I released pressure. The speck was still there, so I tried it again and after about 3 tries, the dust speck was gone !

This editing was done on my MacBook Air. I then checked the same shot on my iPhone photos and it looked okay so I posted it to IG from my phone, as I usually do. However, in looking at my post on my laptop, the specks showed again. In Photos on my laptop the editing held up. In future I'll remember to post from my laptop rather than my phone.

I still hate CleanUp, don't get me wrong. And I sent another complaint/request to Apple to restore the brush. Sequoia updated the other day to 15.1.1. Couldn't tell you why.

I have spent the last few weeks trying to find a solution for Apple's elimination from Photos (with no prior notice or warning to its user base) of the retouch tool. I thought that it might be helpful for me to share with the community what I have explored and what has and hasn't worked. Unfortunately, I have yet to find an acceptable solution. It would be helpful it other folks could share what potential solutions they have investigated.

The most extreme solution is to switch to an alternative photo editing and storage solution like Lightroom. I signed up for a free 7 day trial of Lightroom. I had experimented with Lightroom years ago so I was some what familiar with the product. There is a huge learning curve. However, one problem is that Lightroom is now cloud based and you have to store your images on Adobe's servers. That's a non-starter for me. Adobe does still sell Lightroom Classic as a stand alone product, but it is clunky and out of date and feels like an end of life product. However, the biggest problem with switching to Lightroom (or another Adobe product like Photoshop) is that it appears that alterations to images made in Lightroom (or Photoshop) will not transfer to Photos and vice versa. Thus, Lightroom is not a viable solution unless you are only going to use it for new images and do not intend to import images altered in Lightroom (or Photoshop) into Photos.

I next tried Affinity, which is a reasonably priced editor that does not include a library/organization component like Photos or Lightroom. Once installed, you can access Affinity in Photos in the Edit window and edit an image in your Photos library using Affinity's editing tools. Again, there is a huge learning curve. But the real problem is that it appears that you cannot make additional edits to images previously edited in Photos. You have to start from scratch with the original unedited version. (I plan to contact Affinity support to see if there is a work around but have not yet had the time to do so). So, Affinity does not appear to be a great solution either for those of us who simply want to retouch an image outside of Photos but to continue storing the image in Photos and retouching the image outside of Photos while retaining all prior Photos edits. Apparently, there used to be a separate "retouch" Affinity plug-in that worked in this manner but it appears that it no longer works with the current version of Photos. If anyone has any experience with this plug-in, it would be helpful if you could post it.

Since I have yet to find an acceptable solution, I am currently editing new images in the pre-15.1 version of Photos running on an older Mac and then importing them into the Photos library on my Studio.

I will continue to investigate potential solutions and will share my findings. Since it appears that Apple has no intention of restoring the retouch tool, those of us who would like to continue storing images in Photos need to find a replacement for the retouch tool. There must a a solution out there somewhere. We just need to find it.

holy smokes, I agree. This is ridiculous. What a dumb move by apple. Clean up does not remove zits. If it did, then great I guess, but having the specific spot cleanup of a blemish or other imperfection/abberation in a picture is super useful. I went to edit a couple blemishes on family photos before posting from holiday gatherings and now we are stuck with zits forever. BOO Apple, BOOOO...

Edit: apparently you can make cleanup remove zits. Not as intuitive as retouch, and there was no automatic tutorial that showed the way. DUMB. I like apple, but this was unnecessary.

Someone here posted about an application for mobile and Mac called TouchRetouch. It is on the Apple Store.

This is a fine solution for me and thanks to whomever posted it.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/touchretouch-object-removal/id671595950?mt=12

When I wrote my original comment on December 11, I tried using "clean-up" a few times and didn't like it. Then I was going to downgrade from Sequoia but found out by reading these threads that once you upgrade to Sequoia, you can't downgrade. That REALLY got me wound up. So........I moved the photos I wanted to retouch to my 2015 Macbook Pro running Monterey, retouched them and tried Airdropping them back to my new Macbook Pro running Sequoia and the retouches I made on my old Macbook Pro were gone! Now I was just downright ******! Fortunately, moving the retouched photos to an ssd then to my new Macbook Pro worked, thank God! I really want Apple to bring back retouch, however, I've been using "clean-up" and it's not as bad as I thought. I still think retouch is much better than "clean-up" though.

Clean-up is great as a paint-in tool to remove blemishes and objects, but does not suffice to replace the Retouch tool, because the cloning brush has been a part of the Retouch tool.

I have used Retouch frequently for cloning. And we need a Retouch brush to correct the details, where the Clean-up fails.

I am using Luminar Neo as an editing extension for Photos. It offers all the tools to develop a photo and remove imperfections.

Years ago I purchased Pixelmator but never used it. The strength of Pixelmator is not the photo development but managing layers and graphic overlays - from the user guide: "Creating graphic designs, painting, drawing vector graphics, and adding stunning effects". I want to keep my photos looking like a photo - for me, Luminar Neo, GraphicConverter, and Affinity Photo are the better Editing Tools to supplement Photos.

Thank you for the additional information, Anna.

Yes, that is what I am also seeing. The second slider is bringing the old Retouche tool back, and we can erase blemishes like before. Apple has listened! A nice surprise.

Just the clone option is still missing.

I hope this is not the case, that Apple realizes the blunder that it has made and returns the Retouch feature to Photos in the next update. (How hard could that be?).

So far, the only workaround that I have been able to use with any success is to upload and edit my images in Photos on an older Mac, and then export them to my Studio. I am seriously considering buying a Mac Mini to use just for Photos running a pre-15.1 version of MacOS. I have warned every photographer I know who has not already done so not to upgrade to 15.1.

I tried Pixelmator but did not like it at all. I then saw that Apple just purchased Pixelmator! If Apple intends to incorporate some of Pixelmator's features into Photos it will be a complete disaster.

I will give Apple another month or so to restore Retouch but if this misstep is not rectified by then it seems my only option will be to abandon Photos entirely and switch to Lightroom. I have over 10,000 images in Photos so this will be a colossal undertaking. Unfortunately, unless you are OK with storing your pics on Adobe's server in the cloud, the only option is Lightroom Classic, which has the necessary feature set but its interface is outdated and a bit clunky.

Apple Intelligence, at least when it comes to Photos, appears to be an oxymoron. As a long-time (+30 years) Apple user, I am extremely disappointed.