In iOS 17 you can now go back to old Portrait Mode photographs (even taken before you update your phone) and you can change the focus mode on those images – which means that you can save pictures that didn’t work or you can create new exciting compositions using existing photographs.

Here I’ve got a photo that I took earlier in the year when I was in Boston, and it’s a Portrait Mode photo.

So when I press Edit you get that Orange Box around my face which shows that that’s the part of the image to focus on.

Of course I can change how much background blur there is by using that slider at the bottom, just like I could always do, but what’s brand new now in iOS 17 is if I tap on the background of my photo the focus will shift.

So now my face is blurred and the background is in focus instead.

I can change this to any part of my image, and as I tap around I can get the perfect shot.

This is really useful if perhaps you wear glasses or have hair that wasn’t quite in focus in the original photograph, because now you can zoom in and you can go to the edge of that area and make that in focus and that portrait mode effect will look far clearer than it did before.

And this is another cool cool thing in iOS 17 that makes your phone better than ever.