How to Edit the Depth of Field of Your Photos Without the IPhone XS
iOS: If all of your friends have a new iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max that contains the vastly improved neural engine that Apple loves to talk about, you’re probably jealous of not being able to edit bokeh in your photos after the fact. on your old iPhone.
You probably could, but Apple – more than ever Apple – is limiting the ability to adjust the depth of field of a photo after shooting on its latest iPhones: iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR. In other words, if your iPhone doesn’t have an A12 chip, you’re theoretically out of luck. But not entirely true.
Try checking out an app called Focos instead. This is a free application that allows you to edit the bokeh of your photos by increasing or decreasing the amount of background blur depending on the depth map of the photo. This means that you will only find it useful for portrait mode shots you took with your iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8 Plus, or iPhone X. In fact, these are the only shots that will even appear in your “library” on Focos, since the app will not be able to do anything with the standard picture.
The only problem I ran into with the app is that it struggled to load some of my old photos and I couldn’t figure out if there was a way to get around this. For compatible images, however, Focos couldn’t be simpler. Raise the frame, use the slider to adjust the blurring of the background, and you’re done.
If you want to go crazy (and pay Focos $ 11 for the privilege), the app comes with an obscene amount of other settings you can tweak: the shape of the blur effect itself, lens effects, lens flares, and so on. This is in addition to your (free) ability to adjust lighting in portrait photography, which doesn’t always work out well, but is fun to play with. I’m not sure if you will need much more than its main function – bokeh editing – which you can use for free.