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Tech
AI
Apple
Apple’s new AI photo editing tools mostly work, for better and worse
What is a photo, iOS 27 edition.
The most popular camera in the world just got its first set of serious AI photo editing features, and I don’t think any of us are ready.
As far as AI photo editing goes, the new features in iOS 27 are pretty tame compared to what you can do on, say, Google’s Pixel phones. But for the iPhone, they represent a tipping point in what the native photos app allows you to do to your photos. I mean memories. I mean, I don’t know anymore.
These new features are part of the iOS 27 developer beta right now, so bear in mind that Apple may continue making tweaks to them before they’re released to the general public. There are three, or maybe two and a half, new AI editing features in this update. The new Clean Up tool counts as half, because it existed before but was so bad it didn’t really count. That’s the tool that lets you take photobombers out of the background of your photos, and it got a major upgrade this year. There’s also Extend, which lets you expand the edges of your photo using AI to paint in some plausible-looking filler. And there’s Spatial Reframing, which mimics the effect of moving the camera around the scene to let you recompose an existing photo. It’s the most ambitious and maybe the most problematic of the three.
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But first things first: Clean Up. It’s actually good now. Instead of only using on-device models to remove objects and fill in details, it can now use more powerful models in the cloud. This is what Google has been doing for years now, and it’s why the company’s Magic Editor tools were miles better than the version Apple introduced last year. That totally on-device Clean Up wasn’t very good at painting in convincing details to replace what it removed. It left weird artifacts and was generally more trouble than it was worth. Clean Up 2.0? It does the job.
Using AI to remove stuff from photos is the generative editing tool that I’m the least queasy about using. I’ll use it to remove a booger from my kid’s nose or take a stranger out of the background. This new version in iOS does all of that without a problem, and I think it’s going to be popular with iPhone owners.
Stepping up to the next level of complexity and what-is-a-photo-ness, there’s Extend. Think of it as cropping, but in reverse. It lets you expand the edges of your frame, which you might want to do if your composition was too tight on your subject and you want to give it a little more breathing room, for example. Extend lets you do this, but only to a point. It seems to avoid making edits to people, and will sometimes tell you a photo can only be extended in a particular direction. It will only add a little bit of padding, too, which minimizes the kind of shenanigans it can be used for. I appreciate that. Like Clean Up, it does its job convincingly. It seems predisposed to looking for symmetry, which usually works. It added part of a rally car that was out of frame in my original image, adding a side mirror to match the one already in the photo.