Master image/video–editing
Get your photos and clips looking their best.
After shooting a photo or capturing a clip, you may need to tweak its color, tone, and composition to improve it. Fortunately, iOS 13’s Photos app boasts a powerful digital darkroom to counteract common problems. It can also process footage using the same tools, helping clips to make the grade.
1 Tints and casts
Your iPhone needs to capture true colors under various lighting conditions. This can be a challenge due to the different color temperatures of light. Daylight can cause a shot to look too cold and blue. Artificial light can make skin tones look too warm and orange. Your Camera app will perform an Auto White Balance (AWB) operation to capture cast–free colors. If it can get white objects to be free of blue or orange casts, the rest of the image will have cast-free colors too. If your shots still suffer from color casts you can counteract these in the Photos app. Tap Edit, then tap the Adjust icon and swipe to the Warmth slider. Drag it left to warm up a cold blue shot or right to cool down a warm orange cast. You can also remove green or magenta color tints using the Tint slider. Drag it left to counteract a green tint or right to reduce magenta. These fixes will work with stills or clips.
2 Tonal tweaks
In contrasting lighting conditions, your iPhone may struggle to capture detail in the shadows and the highlights (even when shooting an HDR image). The Adjust panel’s Shadows slider enables you to lighten underexposed shadows without overexposing highlights. The Highlights slider claws back any missing sky detail without underexposing a darker landscape.
3 Distortion
If you shoot a tall building from a low angle its vertical walls appear to converge inwards towards the top of the frame. This phenomenon is called perspectival distortion. If you use an Ultra Wide lens, you’ll want to embrace this perspectival distortion as a feature
of wide-angle photography. However, when using other lenses you can process the picture to make the walls of a building run parallel with the side edges of the frame. Tap Edit, then tap the Crop icon. Tap the Vertical correction icon. Drag the slider right to reduce vertical perspectival distortion.
4 Fun with filters
The Camera app’s Filter icon enables you to quickly grade a photo or clip’s colors and tones to produce a wide range of looks in seconds. Nine thumbnails act as springboards to create striking effects such as Vivid Warm or Dramatic Cool. You can also produce high-contrast mono effects such as Silvertone. The strength of each filter can be dialled down to achieve a more subtle look.