Apple Takes Mobile Photo Editing to a New Level with iOS 16

Apple’s recently announced iOS 16 will include a bunch of interesting features worth acknowledging and it seems that photo editing will definitely earn a place among them.

When it came to photos, the main philosophy of Apple was to incorporate high-quality cameras into their iPhones. In this way, the company’s focus was on capturing very good images from the get-go, rather than providing complex editing options afterward. With iOS 16, Apple is introducing a “Visual Look Up” feature, which allows you to tap on the subject of a photo, like a person, animal or object, and cut it, having the option of pasting it in a message, e-mail or in another app.

While Apple would usually rely on good photo editing apps for more complex editing tasks, the company’s new aim is to include some of the functions of these apps into its operating system for iPhones. Similar to the “Magic Eraser” feature in Google’s Pixel phones, the new feature will take photo editing in iOS to a new level.

According to Apple’s official website, this feature allows you to “lift the subject from an image or isolate the subject by removing the background.” This new addition will also be available in other apps, such as Photos, Screenshot, Safari and Quick Look, which is a quick preview feature developed by Apple. At the same time, the company has announced that Visual Look Up will also be able to recognize birds, insects and statues.

This feature of iOS 16 may represent the beginning of a trend in Apple devices, meant to compete with dedicated photo editing apps. This direction was already taken by one of Apple’s main contenders, Google, which “announced that its Magic Eraser tool, available on Pixel phones, now lets you change the color of objects in your photos with just one tap”, according to Mark Wilson, cameras editor at Techradar.