The Photos app on an iPhone contains a genuinely capable editor, and almost nobody goes past the filters. Four sliders do the overwhelming majority of the work, and using them in the right order takes about twenty seconds per photo.
Where the controls are
Open a photo and tap Edit. Three icons appear: adjustments (the dial), filters, and crop.
The dial is where everything useful lives. Swipe through the row and you will find fifteen or so sliders. Most can be ignored permanently.
The four that matter
Exposure sets overall brightness. Adjust this first, and get it roughly right before touching anything else, because every other slider behaves differently at a different exposure.
Shadows lifts the dark areas without brightening the whole image. This is the single most useful control on a phone, because phone cameras routinely underexpose faces against a bright sky. Raising shadows recovers a face without blowing out the background.
Highlights pulls back the bright areas. Lowering it recovers detail in a sky that has gone white. There is often more information there than the photo appears to show.
Warmth corrects colour cast. Indoor lighting pushes photos orange; overcast days push them blue. A small nudge fixes the “why does this look wrong” feeling that has nothing to do with brightness.
Work in that order. Exposure, shadows, highlights, warmth. Almost every phone photo improves noticeably from those four alone.
Two more worth knowing
Brilliance is Apple’s own composite adjustment. It lifts shadows, controls highlights and adds local contrast at once. A small amount, around 20, adds depth to a flat photo. Pushed far it produces the over-processed look that makes an edit obvious.
Vibrance raises the intensity of muted colours while mostly leaving already-saturated ones alone. It is the better choice than Saturation, which pushes everything and turns skin orange.
Crop before you adjust
Composition beats correction. Cropping into the subject and straightening the horizon improves a photo more than any slider.
The crop tool includes a straighten dial and two perspective controls for vertical and horizontal skew, which are excellent for buildings photographed from below.
Every crop in the Photos app is non-destructive. The original is retained and you can revert at any point, so there is no reason to be cautious.
Copy an edit to other photos
The feature that saves the most time, and it is almost hidden.
Edit one photo, then tap the three dots at the top and choose Copy Edits. Select the other photos, tap the three dots again, and choose Paste Edits.
For a set of pictures taken in the same place and light, one edit fixes all of them. This is how a whole holiday album gets tidied up in five minutes rather than an hour.
Nothing is permanent
Every edit is stored separately from the original file. Open any edited photo, tap Edit, and there is a Revert button that restores exactly what the camera captured, however long ago you edited it.
This is worth knowing because it removes any reason to duplicate a photo before editing, which is what most people do.
Where the good photo actually comes from
Editing improves a photo. It cannot create one.
Two habits at capture time do more than any adjustment afterwards. Tap the screen where you want the exposure set, then slide up or down beside the yellow box to fine-tune it before shooting. And clean the lens, which is smeared far more often than anyone expects and is responsible for most inexplicably hazy photos.
Restraint is the last piece. The edits that look best are usually the ones you would struggle to notice had been made at all.
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