If you know me, then you know I LOVE taking pictures. Although I used to switch between Samsung and Apple, I am now all iPhone. Since September 2015, I have taken almost 27,000 pictures! I really need to clean out my iCloud and every other place where I back them up. Needless to say, I was out with my girlfriends one night, and we were taking pictures. They always want to approve them before I post them to social media because I usually get them up right away!

Anyway, one of my friends closed her eyes during the picture. Everyone else looked great. So, she says, “Can you open my eyes?” I said, “Sure.” I picked up my iPhone, went to edit, clicked on the live photo edit button, found a frame where her eyes were open, made it the key photo, and hit done. Everyone was in awe! They said, “How did you do that?” and “You need to do a blog post about this.”

So, here you go ladies! For more advanced explanations, click here. That site is very helpful if you want to experiment with more photo options. This post is just about a few simple tricks that I have learned that may help you. There are a few slight differences between my iPhone 7 Plus and my husband’s iPhone XR. I will give directions from both because I am not sure where the switch occurred.

iPhone 7 Plus

Go to your camera app. Open it. Across the top, there are five buttons. The flash, HDR (which turns it on or off), a circular bursting kind of button (Live photos), the clock which allows you to turn on the self-timer, and the three circles where you can change the filter of pictures.

Personally, I set the flash to auto, the HDR to auto. The burst is where you want to click to turn on Live photos. If it is white then Live photos are off. If it is yellow, Live photos are on. You need Live photos on in order to open people’s eyes. If you are interested in setting the self-timer you can set your camera up from the front or back-facing camera, and you can set the time for 3 or 10 seconds. When you click the last three circles you can set the filter of the pictures. You can always change these after you take the picture, but I like to keep mine sent in VIVID WARM. It just gives everyone a nice color right from the start without having to go in and edit them all.

Our picture with closed eyes

After you take your picture in the Live mode. Click on the picture you want to edit. At the bottom, click on Edit. There are auto enhancements as well as other edits for brightness, etc. I usually don’t mess with these edits very much.

Click above if you want more help with using these edit buttons. But at the bottom, there is Cancel, the Live burst, the three circles where you can change the filter, and a square where you can Crop, straighten or flip the photo.

In order to open the eyes, you want to click on the Live button. About 12 little snippets of your picture will come up. There is a white dot above the one that is currently automatically picked. You can then go from one end to the other to see which picture you like the best. Then you click on Make Key Photo. Then click Done in the bottom right-hand corner. You can always Revert it to the original and/or cancel any changes you made.

iPhone XR

For the iPhone XR, open your camera app. At the top, is the flash and the Live button. You would need to click it to take Live Photos. There is also an arrow in the middle. If you click on that, buttons will pop up at the bottom of the screen. There, you can turn the flash on and off, turn the Live photos on and off, you can change the picture to 4:3, Square, or 16:9, you can set the self-timer or set the Filter. Once you take your picture, the process is the same as above.

There you have it. My tech lesson for the day 🙂 I hope this helps when you have pictures that you love, but that may be blurred or someone blinked their eyes or moved their hands. Many of these things can be fixed!