8 built-in editing tools to glow up your pictures on your iPhone

Who needs a computer or expensive photo editing software like Adobe Lightroom? You can edit pictures right on your iPhone with Apple’s free, built-in tools.

The Photos app comes with a ton of professional editing tools baked into it. If you didn’t line your shot up quite right, you can fix the crop and perspective. If you took it a split second too late, you can use Live Photo functionality to replace the shot. You can add a Portrait mode blur after the fact, and even change which part of the image is in focus. 

Here are the eight great editing tools built right into your iPhone. 

Eight built-in tools to edit pictures on your iPhone

Taking the perfect picture on the first and only try is a rare occurrence. That picture you hang up on the wall or use as your profile photo for years is often one among 10 or 20 similar-but-not-quite-as-good shots. 

And, in the era of digital photography, you don’t need to fire off multiple frames (and pay to get the film developed) to achieve perfection. You can rely on your iPhone camera, its built-in editing tools and a bit of “computational photography mad science” to make things shine.

If you want to elevate an unremarkable picture to all-timer status, you probably just need to do a little cleanup and editing. You should get to grips with the photo editing tools built into your iPhone (and your iPad and Mac), because they’re really versatile and powerful. Here’s our guide. 

Table of contents: Edit pictures on iPhone

1. Crop to a specific aspect ratio
2. Straighten the perspective
3. Adjust brightness, contrast, color and more
4. Edit the Live Photo
5. Fine-tune the focal point and Portrait mode effect
6. Experiment with Photographic Styles
7. Edit things out of the picture with Image Cleanup
8. Copy and paste edits
9. More tips for managing your photo library

Crop to a specific aspect ratio

If there’s something just peeking through the edge of a shot, you’ll want to crop it out. Maybe you spot a corner of a window or a bit of floor, barely visible on the edge of the picture, that looks distracting. Or, worse, you see the end of someone’s arm who didn’t know they were in the frame of your group photo.

You can fix problems like that with a quick crop. Just tap Edit (the button on the bottom in the center-right), then pick the Crop tool. You can use it to do multiple things:

• If you pinch the photo with two fingers, you can quickly adjust the photo while retaining its original aspect ratio. 
• You can also drag each edge or corner of the photo inward.
• Tap the Aspect Ratio button (in the upper right) to pick a preset. This tool works great if you need a specific size for posting to Instagram or printing out. Scroll through the list on the bottom of the screen for options like Original, Square, Wallpaper, 5:7, 3:5 and more. 
• Tap Flip in the upper left to flip the photo horizontally.
• Tap Rotate in the upper left to change the image’s orientation. 

Straighten the perspective

From the Crop tool, you can also straighten the photo — maybe you took it in a rush, and it’s a little askew.

• The Straighten tool on the left lets you rotate the photo. Drag the slider to correct it left and right. 
• The Vertical (center) and Horizontal (right) sliders let you change the perspective. Maybe you meant to take the photo straight-on, but you’re slightly too low; you can correct that using these tools.

Adjust brightness, contrast, color and more when you edit pictures on iPhone

And then there’s the overall look of the image, which you can also easily tweak. Tap the Adjust tab to edit the photo’s individual properties: exposure, brilliance, highlights, shadows, contrast, brightness, black point, saturation, vibrance, warmth, tint, sharpness, definition, noise reduction and vignette. 

You can press the first setting, Auto, to automatically adjust all those sliders at once. This will instantly enhance the photo. 

Then, if you want to make precise tweaks to the automatic adjustments, scroll through the list to see what changed. Often, I don’t need to make any extra changes. But I do like adding a subtle Vignette for especially artsy photos. 

Edit the Live Photo

If you were a split second late hitting the shutter button, don’t worry. If you captured a Live Photo, you can pick a frame you like better. Live Photos take up more space than regular pics, but they capture several seconds before and after you hit the shutter.

You can also edit when the resulting short video begins and ends by trimming it down.

To make changes to a Live Photo, tap the Live tool at the bottom, then:

• Drag the scrubber in the middle to choose a different moment from the picture, then tap Make Key Photo. This quick edit means your photo contains the best composition, facial expression(s), etc.
• Drag the left and/or right ends of the scrubber inward to trim the video. If you took the photo and then immediately moved the camera, you probably want to cut that part out.

See also: Convert your iPhone’s Live Photos to video in seconds

Fine-tune the focal point and Portrait mode effect

The iPhone’s Portrait mode lets you capture images with a shallow depth of field, which can make your subject stand out from a pleasantly blurry background. It uses 3D depth data and computational wizardry to mimic the look of arty shots taken with DSLR cameras — and you can adjust that background blur after you capture the image. If the focus looks slightly off, you might be able to adjust that, too.

You can select Portrait mode before you shoot. And, if you took the photo with the rear camera of an iPhone 15 or later, you might be able to add a Portrait mode effect after the fact. Portrait mode automatically kicks in if the iPhone camera detects a subject, like a human face or a pet.

Plus, if you tap the screen to focus on a particular part of an image — which you probably should do anyway, if you want your photos to look sharp — that also engages Portrait mode. (Look for the tiny f-stop icon when you’re lining up your shot.)

If you see the Portrait tool available when you go to edit a picture on your iPhone, tap it to make adjustments.

• Drag the slider at the bottom to adjust the depth of field and make the background blurrier or clearer.
• Tap on the photo to change the focal point (just like when you’re taking a picture). 
• Tap the Lighting button in the upper left to change the Portrait mode effect. Scroll through the options along the bottom to check out different lighting styles and effects. 

Experiment with Photographic Styles to edit pictures on iPhone

If you took the photo with an iPhone 16 or later (except for the iPhone 16e and iPhone 17e), you can adjust the Photographic Style as well. Photographic Styles use extra camera sensor data stored alongside the picture to change how the color looks and feels. It’s like switching between specific types of film with different properties. 

This is an extremely easy way to edit pictures on an iPhone and make them look eye-catching. Tap the Styles tool and scroll through the options to the right: Vibrant, Luminous, Dramatic, Quiet, Cozy, Ethereal, Muted Black & White and Stark Black & White. 

Then, you can tweak them even further. Tap on the colorful square under the style’s name to fine-tune the color. Dragging up and down affects the brightness and contrast; dragging left and right affects the color and saturation. The extra slider on the bottom makes the image warmer or cooler. 

Edit things out of the picture with Image Clean Up

If you use an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, you can use the Clean Up tool to remove things from the picture. I use this feature all the time to remove dust and hair from product photos. 

The Clean Up tool will automatically highlight things it thinks you might want to remove. Just tap to remove them. You can also drag your finger to select or circle something to remove.

To read more about the Clean Up tool, check out our article: “How to remove an object from a photo with Apple Intelligence.”

Copy and paste edits

After you spend a few minutes perfecting your favorite photo, you probably don’t want to do all the same work over and over again on every other picture in the set. Luckily, you can copy and paste the edits you made on your iPhone to other pictures 

Go back to the Photos app’s image grid, then tap and hold on an edited photo and tap Copy Edits. Select the edits you want to carry over and tap Done. Then tap Select, and drag your finger across the grid to select a bunch of photos at once. Tap More, then tap Paste Edits to apply your tweaks to all the images.

More tips for managing your photo library

Now that you know how to edit pictures on your iPhone, why not learn some more tricks?

• Hide photos from your library to keep secret and/or illicit images out of your main camera roll. Find them in the Hidden album.
• Tag photos with the names of your friends, family members and pets so you can easily find pictures of them later on. The Photos app will detect pictures of people automatically — you just need to give them a name.
• Find duplicate photos to delete copies you have cluttering up your library.
• Make custom stickers from photos on your iPhone and send them in iMessage, Snapchat and WhatsApp.
• Crop, skew and rotate a photo to fix the perspective or angle a picture was taken from, correct some fisheye distortion on an ultra-wide photo and more.
• Save Live Photos as a video you can play back with full sound or share to social media.
• Convert a video or Live Photo to a GIF that you can put in a website, presentation or group chat.
• Create a photo memories movie using the Apple Photos app, powered by Apple Intelligence. Just type in a prompt, it’ll browse through your collection, and create a bespoke video set to music of your choosing.

D. Griffin Jones

D. Griffin Jones is a writer, podcaster and video producer for Cult of Mac. Griffin has been a passionate computer enthusiast since 2002, when he got his first PC — but since getting a Mac in 2008, he hasn’t turned back. His skills in graphic and web design, along with video and podcast editing, are self-taught over 20+ years. Griffin has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and has written several (unpublished) apps for Mac and iOS. His collection of old computers is made up of 40+ desktops, laptops, PDAs and devices, dating back to the early ’80s. He brings all of these creative and technical skills, along with a deep knowledge of Apple history, into his work for Cult of Mac.