9 Quick and Easy Ways to Make Your iPhone Photos Pop

For special photos, you may well be willing to spend considerable time in a full-on photo editor like Photoshop or Lightroom to get the best possible results. But spending literally seconds in the stock iPhone Photos app can help your everyday photos to pop.

There are some simple guidelines for composing your photos in the first place. But even if you didn’t manage perfect framing at the time you took the shot, the crop tool can soon address the two most common issues.

First, if your horizon is not quite level, then it takes just a few seconds to solve this. Tap on the Crop button, and then slide your finger left or right until the horizon is straight. The app will automatically apply temporary grid lines over the photo to help you see when everything is properly aligned.

Second, you can focus the viewer’s attention on the things you want them to see by removing anything you don’t. This might be a distracting or ugly element like a street sign or a car just moving out of shot, or you may just want to eliminate anything that doesn’t contribute to the scene you were wanting to share.

Take this example of the London skyline at sunset:

What I really want to share here are the iconic London buildings against the sunset. Simply cropping out all of the foreground area really transforms the photo:

You can see that it’s just a much more effective shot.

The Automatic or Magic Image Adjustment

Even if you have no time at all to work on your photos manually, it can be worth hitting the Edit button and then the Magic button just to see whether it enhances the shot. It won’t always do so, but it has a pretty high hit rate.

The changes made by this tool can sometimes be relatively subtle, and hard to identify, but when you view the before and after, you’ll often find the after looks better. Here’s the before:

And the after:

This is subtle for sure, but it’s lifted the shadows, added contrast, and (more controversially) sharpened the image. I’m not a great fan of over-sharpening, but many non-photographers do favor the look.

Dynamic range is the name given to the ability of a camera to capture both darker and lighter areas of a scene. Modern iPhones have much greater dynamic range than many smartphones, but they can still use a little help in scenes with a lot of contrast. In particular, dark areas may appear either close to solid black or very murky and lacking in detail.

Fortunately, the Shadows tool offers an easy fix. Tap the Adjust button and then scroll along to Shadows. Then move right on the scale (done by moving your finger left …) to boost the shadows.

This is very often a great fix when shooting a person against the sun, but it can also be very helpful for night shots. For example, take a look at this photo of the Millennium Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral:

Now, personally, I rather like this kind of moody shot. However, many people prefer a bit more punch, and lifting the shadows is a simple way to provide this:

If you’re wondering how much adjustment to make, it’s best to judge this by eye as the appropriate amount will vary by photo, and this is art rather than science. However, if you want a guide as to a starting point, then somewhere in the +60 to +70 range often works well.

The Black Point as a Way to Add Punch

There are times when you want to do the opposite and actually darken the shadow areas. This is achieved by changing what’s known as the Black Point. In other words, we take areas that are a shade of dark gray in the original photo, and we make those areas darker—more like solid black—without affecting the overall exposure. Along with this, the rest of the darker tones will become darker still, while leaving the lighter tones as they are.

This can be particularly useful when shooting into the sun. Take this example:

The trees and buildings on the far side of the water look rather hazy, which is typical of the light scattering you get when shooting into the light. By boosting the Black Point, we can reduce the haze. This also helps the people in the scene to stand out more from the background:

As with the Shadows adjustment, this is a +60-ish adjustment.

One thing to note here is that the woman’s jeans now have a rather splotchy effect, from some areas being dark enough to have been affected while other parts weren’t. This wouldn’t be a good effect if the woman was the focus of your shoot, but in this case, with the couple being just part of the scene, I don’t think most people would notice this unless looking for it.

Saturation or Vibrance to Make Colors Pop

This is the one adjustment most people make to their photos. In my view, boosting saturation is frequently overdone to the point where you get rather cartoon-like colors. You also need to be careful with things like sunsets, as boosting the saturation often introduces distortions, creating visible artifacts where different colors blend together. For this reason, my advice here is to go easy on saturation boosts.

If you’re photographing people, then you don’t want to boost saturation in people’s faces, especially Caucasian people, where their faces can appear red. Instead, use the Vibrance control, which you’ll find right next to Saturation.

Saturation boosts can work particularly well when there is one predominant color in the scene, like forest scenes. Another example is the “blue hour,” about 30-40 minutes after sunset. Take this example of Tower Bridge at dusk:

This looks good, but the water has more gray than blue in it. Boosting the saturation brings out the blue in the water, too. I’ve tried to find a balance point of enhancing the blue in the water without making the sky look unrealistic. In this case, that was a saturation boost of +19:

Another way I could have done this was to adjust the color temperature to a cooler setting, but that would have altered the color of the bridge, too.

Color Temperature Can Transform the Mood

Color temperature is a way of describing how “cool” or “warm” a photo looks. A scene biased toward blues will look cool, while one biased toward yellows will look warm. We use these terms because they reflect the seasons: winter scenes tend to be cooler in color temperature, while summer scenes are warmer.

London tends toward cooler colors. It’s a moderately sunny day, but that feeling doesn’t come across in this photo of St Paul’s Cathedral:

I wanted to make the day feel sunnier, so I increased the color temperature, which is shown in the editing panel as a water-drop-like icon intended to represent a thermometer. I’ve made quite an exaggerated change here to show the effect clearly; in reality, I wouldn’t generally go quite this far:

Adjusting Depth of Field for Portraits

If you’re photographing people against a busy background, I recommend using Portrait mode. In the Camera app, you’ll find this right next to the standard Photos slider. This allows you to artificially reduce the depth of field, either when you take the photo or later when you edit it.

In general, I like to get things right on camera, but since it makes no difference in this case, I advise not worrying about it when taking the shot so you can concentrate on the composition and the facial expression of your subject.

Take this example of a woman photographed with London’s City Hall in the background:

The building is slightly blurred, so there’s a little separation between her and the background, but if you tap the Portrait button and then use the slider, you can blur the building more to make her stand out more. Since the blurring also made the crane more distracting, I cropped that out at the same time:

Another tool I could have used to remove the crane is the Clean Up tool. This is only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 as it’s an Apple Intelligence feature. To use it, you tap or circle the object you want to remove.

Take this shot of London skyscrapers:

I needed to stand in a particular position to compose the shot, but that meant that an ugly power or telephone line was visible. I tapped the Clean Up button which automatically worked out that was what I probably wanted to remove and highlighted it for me, so I simply tapped it to confirm. If it hadn’t done that, I would simply have dragged my finger along the line. The result was this:

Note that all Apple Intelligence features are in beta, so results can vary, but it’s always worth trying if you can’t avoid including a distracting element when taking the photo.

Photographic Styles on the iPhone 16

Finally, for the iPhone 16 only, there’s a new Photographic Styles option, which can again be selected when taking the photo or when editing it. These are effective photo filters, but high-quality ones designed to enhance the look, not apply cartoon-like effects. I’m including a few examples here. First, the original shot taken with the 5x lens, so the background blur is natural rather than artificial:

This is the style labeled as Quiet, which creates a rather dreamy effect:

The Gold style, which is punchier and more saturated while still working for the skin tone:

And finally, the Muted Black-and-White style. In Lightroom, I have presets for literally 20 different black-and-white conversions, so you could say I’m quite fussy about my mono tones! But I’m honestly impressed by the Muted style every time I use it—Apple has done a fantastic job here:

All of the edits you’ve seen in the above examples were done in Apple’s Photos app, and most took literally just a few seconds. None took longer than 30 seconds. Making your iPhone photos pop really is that quick and easy.