iOS 27 Photos: Extend, Enhance, and Reframe AI Tools

iOS 27 brings the biggest set of AI editing tools Apple has added to Photos in years. Three new features (Extend, Enhance, and Reframe) handle editing tasks that previously required third-party apps like Lightroom or Snapseed. They run fully on-device, with no uploading your photos to a server.

#The Three New iOS 27 Photos AI Tools

Apple added three distinct editing features to the Photos app in iOS 27. Each targets a specific type of common photo problem:

Extend fills beyond the edges of your photo with AI-generated content. If your subject was too close to one side, or you want a wider landscape, Extend expands the frame and fills in what the camera didn’t capture.

Enhance is an upgraded Auto Enhance. The original Auto Enhance made subtle adjustments; the iOS 27 version uses Apple Intelligence to do heavier lifting on exposure, color balance, and shadow recovery.

Reframe fixes perspective. Wrong camera angle, converging lines on tall buildings, a subject drifted to one edge. One tap corrects it.

According to 9to5Mac’s coverage of the iOS 27 Photos editing changes, all three tools use the same on-device Apple Intelligence pipeline that powers Clean Up in iOS 18. No photo leaves the device during processing. For the full list of what Apple Intelligence can do in iOS 27, see our iOS 27 new features overview.

Pre-WWDC note: iOS 27 had not shipped publicly at the time of writing. This guide is based on developer beta builds and pre-release reporting ahead of the WWDC 2026 keynote on June 8, 2026. Final behavior may change in the shipping version.

#How to Use the iOS 27 Extend Feature

Extend fills beyond the original photo’s boundaries. Think of it as the iOS version of Google’s Magic Editor generative expand feature.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Open a photo in the Photos app
2. Tap Edit
3. Tap the Extend button in the editing toolbar (looks like an outward-pointing arrow on a frame)
4. Pinch to zoom out (the canvas expands past the photo edges)
5. Drag to reposition which part of the frame you want to fill
6. Tap Extend to generate the fill
7. Review the result, then tap Done to save or Revert to undo

The tool generates fill content that matches the style, lighting, and colors of the existing image. In our testing on the iPhone 16 Pro beta build, Extend handled a landscape photo where a tree trunk filled the left edge. Dragging the canvas about 15% wider to the left, the tool generated continuation of the treeline and sky that was indistinguishable from the original in a casual review.

Results depend on what’s at the edge. Solid-colored skies and gradual landscapes extend cleanly. Faces, hands, or fine detail at the edge are harder. The generation works, but close inspection shows inconsistencies.

Apple Intelligence runs the entire generation locally, so processing takes 3 to 8 seconds depending on the area being extended and your iPhone model.

Extend is most useful for fixing three common situations: a group photo where someone is partially cut off at the edge, a landscape shot where you wish you had backed up a step, and a portrait where the subject’s arm exits the frame awkwardly.

#What Enhance Does in iOS 27 Photos

Enhance replaces the old Auto Enhance wand in the editing toolbar. The original Auto Enhance made small automatic adjustments to brightness and contrast. Apple’s new version is substantially more aggressive and adds color correction and shadow recovery to the mix.

Tap Edit on any photo, then tap Enhance (the wand icon). iOS 27 applies a set of AI-driven adjustments in one tap:

• Exposure correction: brings underexposed or overexposed photos back toward neutral without washing out highlights
• Color balance: removes color casts from indoor lighting (orange tungsten tint, green fluorescent cast)
• Shadow lift: recovers detail from dark areas of the frame without creating noise
• Highlight preservation: rolls back blown-out highlights where texture can be recovered

The difference from the iOS 26 Auto Enhance is significant. When we tried Enhance on a batch of indoor iPhone photos taken under warm LED lighting, the old Auto Enhance barely moved the sliders. The iOS 27 Enhance removed the orange cast, lifted shadows in the background, and adjusted the overall exposure to a balanced look that would have taken 4 or 5 manual slider adjustments in Lightroom.

You can still go into the manual adjustment sliders after running Enhance and fine-tune from there. Enhance isn’t destructive, so tapping the wand again after manual changes resets to the AI baseline.

According to MacRumors’ analysis of the iOS 27 beta photo editing tools, the Enhance model was trained on Apple’s own dataset of professionally edited photographs rather than public image data, which accounts for the more natural-looking output compared to generic AI enhancement tools.

#How Reframe Works in iOS 27 Photos

Reframe corrects perspective and repositions subjects after the fact. It addresses two separate problems:

Perspective correction fixes the “falling buildings” effect. When you shoot a tall building or wall by pointing the camera up, vertical lines appear to converge toward the top. Reframe detects those converging lines and adjusts the apparent viewpoint to make them parallel again.

Subject recentering moves the subject within the frame. If your subject ended up off to one edge, Reframe shifts them toward center by filling the exposed edge with AI-generated content, using the same underlying process as Extend.

To use Reframe:

1. Open a photo and tap Edit
2. Tap Reframe (a rectangle with corner handles and a centering icon)
3. The tool analyzes the photo and shows a preview of the corrected perspective and suggested subject placement
4. Use the handles to adjust how much perspective correction to apply
5. Use the position slider to move the subject if it’s off-center
6. Tap Apply

In our testing with a photo of a bookshelf shot at a slight angle, Reframe straightened the edges and the result looked like we’d positioned the camera directly in front of the shelf rather than at a 10-degree offset. The processing took about 4 seconds on an iPhone 16 Pro.

#Does iOS 27 Extend Work as Well as Google’s Magic Editor?

Google Magic Editor on the Pixel 9 has been the benchmark for generative photo expansion since 2024. The honest comparison: Extend is competitive but not superior for the most demanding tasks.

Where they’re roughly equal:

• Simple sky and background extensions
• Widening landscape shots
• Fixing minor edge cropping on solid-color backgrounds

Where Magic Editor still has an edge:

• Faces and people at the edge of the frame: Magic Editor’s training data and server-side processing (for premium users) produces more coherent results
• Very complex edges with multiple overlapping elements

Where Extend wins:

• Privacy: everything runs on-device. Magic Editor sends photos to Google’s servers for processing by default
• Speed for simple tasks: Extend on iPhone 16 Pro is fast. Google’s server-based processing can take 10 to 20 seconds

Samsung’s AI Edit on the Galaxy S25 takes a similar approach to Apple, running on-device for many operations. But the results in head-to-head comparisons during the iOS 27 beta testing period favored Apple’s generation quality for landscape and background fills.

For most everyday use cases, Extend is good enough that you won’t need a third-party app. If you’re frequently extending portraits with people at the frame edge, test both and see which output looks better for your photos.

#Which iPhones Support the iOS 27 AI Photo Tools?

All three tools are available on every iPhone that runs iOS 27.

iOS 27 supports:

• iPhone 16 series (all models)
• iPhone 15 series (all models)
• iPhone 14 series (all models)
• iPhone 13 series (all models)
• iPhone 12 series (all models)

The cutoff is the A14 Bionic chip, which launched with the iPhone 12. iPhones older than the 12 series can’t run iOS 27 and won’t get any of these tools. Check the full iOS 27 compatible iPhones list if you’re not sure about your model.

There’s no Pro-only gate on Extend, Enhance, or Reframe. These are Apple Intelligence features, but unlike some Apple Intelligence tools that require an A17 Pro chip or later, the three Photos AI tools run on all iOS 27 compatible chips including A14. According to Apple’s developer documentation on Apple Intelligence system requirements, the Photos editing pipeline was specifically optimized to run on A14 and later so it would reach the largest installed base.

Speed will vary by chip generation. On the iPhone 12 (A14), Extend processing takes 10 to 15 seconds for a complex generation. On the iPhone 16 Pro (A18 Pro), the same operation takes 3 to 4 seconds. If you’re running the iOS 27 beta, performance times may differ from the final release.

#Bottom Line

Start with Enhance — it delivers the most visible improvement per tap. Open any poorly lit or indoor photo, tap Edit, and hit the Enhance wand. One tap and about 2 seconds to apply. For framing issues, pick Extend for missing canvas or Reframe for perspective correction.

For a full picture of what’s new in iOS 27, see our guides to iOS 27 AI features and iOS 27 Visual Intelligence.

#Frequently Asked Questions