Take photos then widen your angle after on iPhone 11

It doesn’t sound possible, but if you have an iPhone 11 or iPhone 11 Pro/Max you can take a photo or video and then use the crop tools to do the opposite of what you normally do: Crop thing in instead of out.

Your iPhone allows you to do that by using multiple cameras to take multiple simultaneous pictures at different zoom levels and then stitching them together into a single image. It will show in your Photos just as you took it, but it will hold the data from the extra wide-angle photo for 30 days should you decide to re-edit the photo to include the extra part. After that, to conserve space the extra data is discarded if it’s not used.

To start, first, you will want to turn the feature on in the Settings app > Camera. I recommend turning on all of the options under the “Composition” section.

Now when taking a photo you may notice that in addition to seeing the photo in the image preview, there is more on the outside that you can see greyed out on the edges. This is the extra photo that can be included later if you wish. Go ahead and snap a photo.

Now open your Photos app. As you’re browsing through your photos you will see that some have an icon in the upper right corner that looks like a square bracket with a star. These are the images that were successfully captured with data outside the frame. Not all pictures will have this. Only photos at 1x or 2x zoom, only if they are well-lit, and only if the phone manages to stitch the images together successfully.

To adjust your photo outward, tap the Edit button above the photo, then tap the cropping tool (the funny bracket icon) and drag the cropping marks, drag the photo, or pinch to zoom the photo to adjust how you want to crop. You’ll simply have more space to work with. Then tap the “Done” button in the upper right corner.

And there you go. Now you’ve got more picture than you originally took! You may notice a little warping as the phone forces the two images together, but with any luck, it will be acceptable. You’ll see in my photo below that the lens flare is broken, one flare from each camera, but I kind of like the effect.