Apple’s iOS 16 software will be released publicly on Monday, a week after the company introduced the new iPhone 14 series, and with the release of iOS 16 will come one of the best ways to edit photos I’ve ever seen. The feature hasn’t been given a name, but it works like this: Tap and hold on a photo to separate the subject of an image, such as a person, from the background. And if you keep holding it, you can then “pick up” the crop from the photo and drag it into another app to post, share, or create a collage, for example. Technically, tap-and-lift photo is part of Visual Look Up, which first came out with iOS 15 and can identify objects in your photos, like plants, food, landmarks, and even pets. In iOS 16, Visual Look Up lets you pick up that object from a photo or PDF by doing nothing more than a long press. During WWDC, Apple showed someone tapping and holding the dog on a photo to raise it from the background and share it in a Message. apple Robby Walker, Apple’s senior director of Siri Language and Technologies, introduced the new tap-and-lift tool during WWDC in a photo of a French bulldog. The dog was “cut” out of the photo and then dragged and dropped into the text field of a message. “It feels like magic,” Walker said. Sometimes Apple overuses the word “magic,” but this tool looks impressive. Walker was quick to point out that the result was the result of an advanced machine learning model, which is accelerated by Apple’s machine learning core and neural engine to perform 40 billion operations in a second. Knowing the amount of processing and machine learning required to crop a dog out of a photo excites me to no end. Many times new phone features have to be revolutionary or solve a serious problem. I guess you could say that the tap and hold tool solves the problem of removing the background of a photo, which at least for some could be a serious issue. I couldn’t help but notice the similarity to another photo feature in iOS 16. On the lock screen, the photo editor separates the foreground subject from the background of the photo used for your wallpaper. So lock screen elements like the time and date can be placed behind your wallpaper theme but in front of the photo background. It makes it look like a magazine cover. I tested the new Visual Look Up feature in the public beta for iOS 16. I’m still impressed with how fast and reliably it works.
