Make iPhone photos look prettier with Luminar Mobile

Berlin (dpa) — Great photo, if it weren't for that guy walking through the picture in the background. Great selfie! Unfortunately, you can still see the chocolate I ate earlier on my nose. Who hasn't had photo moments like that?

If you’re an Android user you’re in luck: Google Photos has AI tools for image editing, allowing you to retouch and remove unwanted things. Depending on the phone manufacturer you’ll have more and less features. A subscription to Google One unlocks even more features.

However, if you’re using an iPhone, at least for now you’ll need to get an app to do edits like retouching and removal. Apple’s Photos app does offer a number of options for image editing but it has its limits.

One option is the Luminar Mobile Photo Editor. It can do more than the usual image editing such as changing contrast, exposure or colour settings. Is the sky not spectacular enough? You can replace it. Make someone’s waist appear smaller? Go ahead. Skin imperfections and other small errors? Remove them with a swipe.

Luminar Mobile only works on images in the portrait format. In practice, the edits usually looks good, but the app does not allow you to do manual corrections if the AI image editing does not work quite as desired.

An annual subscription to the app costs €23.99/$26 or €3.99/$4.40 monthly, but there’s a free one-week trial period.

But if you don’t want to spend money: The next update to the iOS operating system is going to bring advanced photo editing features such as the ability to remove unwanted objects. iOS 18 is expected to be released in September.