Photo editing in iOS 27 on the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and iPhone Duo adds what Apple calls Photographic Styles 3. (It was perhaps named by the same people who named the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display.)
Photographic Styles 3, or PS3 for short — no one’s using that acronym, right? — lets you adjust texture and grain levels for photographs you’ve taken on those latest iPhones.
I use the features a lot, or at least experiment with them. I have come to the conclusion that the user interface for PS3 sucks.
First off, I have to hunt for the feature each time I want to use it. The Styles button underneath photos is the right starting place, but it still shows the photographic styles available on earlier models of iPhones, too. But then you have to tap on the tiny Customize button.
There, you can adjust Palette — which tweaks the Photographic Style you already have in place. Or you can tap the Texture tab, which offers the Soft Skin, Glow, Film, and separate Grain options.
When you choose any of those options, there’s a subtle, partially unmarked slider that appears below it. Swipe across that, and you can adjust the intensity of the effect. But I maintain that the slider is a bit too understated, and that even the sliding orientation feels a smidgen counterintuitive.
Switch from, say, Soft Skin to Glow, and your Soft Skin adjustment is lost. Go back to it, and any refinement you adjusted with the subtle slider is gone, back to iOS’s recommendation for that photo instead. Want Glow and Soft Skin? Tough.
Film falls into the same bucket.
But Grain, separated by a thin vertical pipe from the other three settings, is a toggle that can be turned on or off alongside (or separately from) the other three styles.
All of this is complicated to describe — because it’s complicated to use. Apple (rightly) earns kudos for its thoughtful, intuitive user interfaces. But this one, which I view as intended to let hobbyists get finer-grained (ha!) control over their photos, is designed with too little user friendliness in mind. I look forward to the next iteration, which I choose to believe will be better. I’m an optimist.
