Remove, Replace or Blur the Background Of a Photo On Your iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to remove, replace, or blur backgrounds in Photos on your iPhone. 

Now let's say you have a photo in the Photos App on your iPhone. Let's say I just want to have the subject. I want to remove this background. It's actually extremely easy to do this. All you need to do is tap and hold on the photo, like this, and you'll see that little animation there where it selects the subject. It helps if the subject is clearly defined and different colors than the background, like here. Then you get a menu here of various items. We're going to use Share here. Then I'm simply going to tap the Save Image button. What this will do then is save this as a new photo with just the subject and the background removed. If I go back to my Library I can see it right here. There's my subject with no background at all. It's not a white background. There's nothing there. If I tap to view the photo, like that, you can see it actually changes the background to black. So I can now Share this photo anyway I want and only the subject will be included. It will be a transparent background. This includes using it in other apps where you want transparency, like maybe using this in a Pages document with simply no background behind the subject. 

But note I could have also selected Copy. That would simply Copy the subject to the Clipboard. I could then go to another app, like for instance here in the Messages App. I can tap here and Paste. You can see how I get the subject with no background. You can paste into Mail, Pages, just about anything else that will use a transparent image like this. 

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Now let's say, instead, I want to Replace the background with something else. So keep the subject but a different background. Or another way to look at it is to take a subject and put them in a different location. So you can do that by tapping and holding like before and choosing Copy. This copies just the subject to the Clipboard. Now let's go and find another image to put the subject in. Let's choose this one right here. Now I can't Paste another layer on top of this photo in the Photos App. But I can do it in the new Preview App. So what I want to do here is tap the Share button at the bottom left and select Preview. If you don't see Preview here you can move over to the right, tap More, and you'll find it there and can even add it to this list, if you like. I'm going to go to Preview here and it's going to Open up that photo in Preview. Now that I'm in Preview I can Paste another layer on top of this. The trick is to first enter Markup Mode by tapping this button there at the bottom left. Once in Markup Mode you need to tap the Selection Pencil here. With the Selection Pencil selected you can now tap in the middle of the photo and if you have an image in the Clipboard you'll get Paste. You can now Paste the image there. It will ask if you want to allow this. I'll say, of course, yes. There we go. There's Jack now in this photo. I can position Jack and resize him like this and then turn Off the Markup Tools, like that, and there's Jack in this photo. 

Now you've got this here as a file. You could tap here and you could move it or rename it. It's probably saved in your Preview folder inside of iCloud Drive. But if you want to add it back to your Photos Library you can. Just tap the Share button here and then you'll find Save Image there as well. Now back in Photos I can take a look and I can find that photo right next to the original one because it retains the same date as the original. 

Now let's say you want to Blur the background instead of removing it. You may want to do this to help the subject stand out better or maybe the background isn't important or maybe there are other people back there and you kind of want to blur out the whole scene. You can do this a couple of ways. So, if the photo has a portrait mode, you would see portrait up here and sometimes you may have it turned off or you can turn it on. This could be because you took the photo with Portrait Mode on your iPhone. Also, often Portrait Mode is used automatically to save information about the subject and the background in a photo. So even if you just took a regular photo you may still find you have the ability to switch to Portrait Mode here. Now just go to your Adjustment Tools. Select Portrait here at the bottom and then look to see if the subject is blurry. If the subject is blurry, maybe because this yellow box is focusing on another portion of the photo. So all you need to do is just tap on the subject and now the subject should be in sharp focus. Then you can use this Slider here to adjust the background. You can make the background sharp as well but you can go all the way to the other side to make the background blurry. That's a really quick simple way to blur the background if it is available for that photo. 

However, if you don't have Portrait Mode available for a photo, like this one here, you can still do it using some tricks. For instance, you can do it with the Preview App. We're going to go and copy the subject, just like we did before, and Copy. Then we're going to Share the entire photo to Preview. So now we've got the whole thing in Preview we want to blur everything and then paste the subject right over where he is right now. Unfortunately there's no tool for blurring the background in Preview. You can do it in other Image Editing Apps on your iPhone but if we just want to stick with Preview then one way to do that is to tap on the 3 dots button here. Go to Adjust Size. Now this photo here is about 4000 pixels wide. I'm going to shrink it down so far that it becomes blurry. I'm going to select the size here and then I'm going to go to something much smaller, like let's say 100 pixels. That is going to compress the image so much from 4000 pixels across to only 100 pixels across that you can see there's not much detail left in the photo. In other words it is blurry. Now if I were to paste Jack in again here Jack would be just as blurry because there's only 100 pixels across to work with. So I want to go back in here and Adjust Size again and then I want to go back to the original size. It is not going to add any information back in. It's taking those 100 pixels and it is stretching them now across the 4000 pixels. So now when I go to the Markup Tools I make sure the Selection Tool is selected there and I tap in the middle and Paste. I can paste in Jack at full resolution because we've got all the pixels here that we need and I can stretch him to go across. A little tricky to get him to match exactly or at least cover the blurrier version of himself there. But now you can see I've got the original Jack and I've got the compressed and then uncompressed blurry version of the rest of the photo behind him. So I'll Exit the Markup Tools. I will Share and I'm going to Save this back to Photos. Then in the Photos App I've got the original version and then I've got this version with the blurry background. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.