How to Turn Normal Photos into Portrait Mode Photos on iPhone 15

Oct. 23, 2023

Prerequisites to Turn a Regular Photo into a Portrait Mode Photo

First, you need to understand that you cannot turn every photo into a Portrait mode photo. Your iPhone needs to record the depth information to apply the portrait effect. Unfortunately, your iPhone doesn’t do this for every photo. An iPhone 15 model will automatically capture the depth information when it detects a person, dog, or cat in the frame. The phone also captures this information when you tap the frame to focus on a subject.

In addition to this, you need to know the following:

The ‘next-gen Portrait mode’ is an iPhone 15-exclusive feature that lets you apply a soft and artful bokeh effect to the background and puts all the attention on the subject after you’ve taken a photo. So, if you’ve got an iPhone 15, 15 Plus, 15 Pro, or15 Pro Max, you can easily turn a normal photo into a Portrait after you’ve captured it. Here’s how you do it:

After you’ve turned a regular picture into a portrait, you can also adjust the level of the background blur and intensity of the lighting effects. Here’s how to do it.

An iPhone 15 model automatically captures the depth information of a photo where a person, dog, or cat is prominent in the frame. While it’s a handy feature that lets you convert a regular photo into a portrait one after shooting, it takes up extra storage space to store the depth information. If you don’t want your iPhone to capture the depth information of a photo, you can choose to disable it in Camera settings. Here are the steps to do it:

You can always choose to take the photo in a Portrait mode. For this, open the Camera app and tap onPortrait.

Going forward, if you didn’t switch to Portrait mode, remember you can always turn a normal photo into a Portrait mode photo on an iPhone 15 model. Bear in mind that the next-gen Portrait mode is only available on iPhone 15 models. No other iPhones, even the ones runningiOS 17can utilize this feature.

Did you try next-gen Portraits on your iPhone 15? Do share your experiences with us in the comments below.