How To Photoshop On An iPhone – Edit With Ease (2024)

We don’t only want to take great photos with our smartphones, we want to edit them to perfection too. Adobe’s Photoshop has long been the app of choice for professional photo editors, but even amateur snappers can Photoshop on an iPhone too.

This article will show you how to Photoshop on an iPhone—without having to pay hundreds of dollars like the pros do for the software. You’ll find out how to Photoshop faces, how to crop people out of photos, and how to layer photos on top of one another.

Can You Photoshop On An iPhone?

Photoshop is the industry standard photo-editing software that is used by professional photographers, and magazine and newspaper editors around the world. Adobe has created a version of the software that is designed specifically for iPhones.

Why would you want to use it, when your iPhone already lets you edit photos? Because it offers a far greater range of editing tools than Apple offers in the Photos app. For example, you can turn a grumpy grimace into a pleasant smile in a group photo. You can take parts of one image and overlay them on another. Or you can erase unwanted objects or strangers from your snaps.

What Photo Editing Apps Are Available For An iPhone?

There are hundreds of photo-editing apps available for the iPhone, including Pixelmator, Snapseed and VSCO. Many of these apps are free, although some will demand in-app payments to unlock advanced features.

However, if you want the authentic Photoshop treatment, then you need to look for the apps by Adobe. The company has two photo-editing apps in the iPhone App Store: Photoshop Express (which we’ll talk more about shortly) and Lightoom.

Lightroom is an app designed for photography enthusiasts, and you have to pay to unlock its more advanced features.

Adobe Photoshop Express

Adobe Photoshop Express is a much simpler version of the full-blown Photoshop software, designed specifically for touchscreen use.

It’s free to download from the iPhone App Store, although you will need to register for an account when you open the app for the first time. You can log in with Google GOOG or Apple credentials if you don’t want to register for an Adobe account.

Once you’ve signed in, the iPhone will ask if you want to give permission to Photoshop Express to access your photo library. Make sure to give it full permission from the pop-up menu that appears, or else you won’t be able to use the editing tools on your snaps.

Even though it’s a free app, Photoshop Express has a huge range of editing features, some of which we’ll explore in greater detail below. You can use it to apply filters to your photos, to change the background, to smooth the skin or apply virtual make-up to a portrait’s face, or to create impactful collages of your snaps.

How Can You Edit Photos On An iPhone Without An App?

If you don’t wish to add another app to your phone or you’ve not got enough storage space, you can edit your snaps from the built-in Photos app itself.

Tap an image in the Photos app and select Edit at the top of the screen. Here you can do things such as crop images, apply filters and change the brightness of images.

One of the more clever iPhone editing tricks is the ability to cut out people from images. If you have a portrait of someone, for example, press and hold your finger on them and you should see their outline glow. You can now paste that selection into other apps or even save it a Sticker that you can use in Messages, for example.

Can You Edit Photos For Free On An IPhone?

Photoshop Express is a completely free app, and it has the vast majority of features you’ll ever want on a smartphone. There are no in-app purchases to unlock advanced features, like there are with many other photo-editing apps.

It’s also worth noting that there’s a separate Photoshop app available for iPad tablets. This is much closer to the professional desktop software than Photoshop Express, and you will need an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to use that app.

How To Use Photoshop From Your iPhone

There are dozens of different features in Photoshop Express and we can’t dive into them all. But the quickest way to get to the main editing features is to click on one of your photos from the main Photoshop Express screen.

This will open a range of tools towards the bottom of the screen. Adjustments, for example, will let you adjust brightness and colors, as well as sharpen the image and apply effects such as vignettes, where the corners of portraits are darkened to throw more focus on to the person’s face.

The Heal tools make it easy to remove unwanted objects or blemishes from your photos. Simply swipe your finger over the object you want to remove and let the software do its magic. If it doesn’t work properly first time, the Advanced tab can help you refine the effect.

The app includes all manner of other tools, including overlays (make your portraits look more grungy), themes (turn a photo into a birthday greeting) and text tools (add your own message on top of an image, in a range of funky fonts).

Now let’s dive deeper into some of the more advanced editing tools.

How Do You Photoshop Faces On An iPhone?

Photoshop Express has a huge range of tools for editing facial features, which you’ll find by opening a photo and then clicking Face at the bottom of the screen.

Note that if you’re editing a photo with more than one face in it, the selected face will be marked with blue brackets on either side. To change the face you’re editing, just tap on another person’s face, and the brackets around their face should change from white to blue.

There are an enormous amount of tweaks you can apply to faces. You can increase or shrink the overall size of the face, make it thinner or fatter, or even alter the direction the person is looking.

Individual facial features can also be adjusted by clicking on Lips, Nose and Eyes. Perhaps the most useful tool here is the Smile slider in Lips. Drag the slider to the right and you can turn a grimace into a smile. The effect doesn’t always work convincingly, but if someone was caught off-guard in a group photo, it can make them look less grumpy.

Also look out for the Touchup and Makeup features. Touchup includes features such as adding glow to the skin or whitening teeth. Makeup turns you into a virtual makeup artist, letting you apply daring shades of lip gloss, for example. The app automatically identifies the lips—you only need pick the color.

How Do You Crop Someone Out Of A Photo On An iPhone?

Cropping someone out a photo is a quick job with Photoshop Express.

If the person you want to crop out is on the edge of the frame, you might be able to do so with the basic crop tools. Open the image, then select Crop from the icons at the foot of the Photoshop Express app window.

Now drag in the markers in the four corners of the image with your finger until you’ve cropped the unwanted person out of the image. You can save your changes by clicking the down arrow icon at the top of the screen.

If the person you want to remove is in the middle of an image, the Heal tool might come to the rescue. With Heal selected, wipe your finger over the person you want to remove and the app will try to vanish them!

This doesn’t always work perfectly and you’ll get the best results on plain, uncluttered backgrounds. Use the undo feature (back arrow icon) if it doesn’t work first time, and use the Advanced tab to see if you can get better results by manually selecting the background area to clone into the image in place of your unwanted person.

How Do You Layer Photos On An iPhone?

Let’s say you’ve got two images: one a nice portrait and another a lovely Christmas tree that you want to put the people in the portrait in front of. You can use Photoshop Express to layer photos on an iPhone.

To do this, open the Photoshop Express app and select Combine Photos. Pick the portrait image first. When that image opens, select the Cutout icon at the bottom of the screen. The app should create a selection of the people in your image.

You may need to tidy up the selection, using the Add or Remove tools to brush in or brush away unwanted parts of the selection.

Once you’ve got a nice tidy selection of your person, click the + button and select the second image, say of the Christmas tree you want to use in the background. As prompted on screen, you might need to drag and hold on the thumbnail image of your portrait to make it the top layer in the photo, sitting above the Christmas tree image.

You can now continue to edit both layers individually (just click each layer’s thumbnail image to select it) until you’ve got everything looking just perfect. When everything is right, click the three dots icon near the thumbnail images and merge the layers before saving.

Bottom Line

It’s genuinely stunning how much editing power is available to iPhone owners via free apps such as Photoshop Express. As ever with photo editing, don’t get too carried away with the tools. But simple, natural-looking fixes can really lift the quality of your photography.