While the lock screen is one of the main features of iOS 16, there’s another nice addition that’s a little less obvious: the ability to easily crop subjects from photos. It’s a way to easily separate a subject from a background and quickly share or paste the results into applications. What normally takes a lot of time and effort when using photo editing software can be done with a few simple steps in iOS 16. It is surprisingly good and you can easily share the results with your group chat for maximum entertainment. This is how it works.

I followed these steps on both an iPhone 11 with iOS 16.0.2 and an iPhone 14 Pro with iOS 16.1 developer beta three.

• Open Apple’s Photos app.
• Find a photo in your camera roll with a subject you want to isolate and crop, such as a person, pet, or a prominent object.
• Long press on the subject until you feel a haptic buzz and see a white border appear identifying your subject.
• From here tap either To copy or Part.

If you copy the image, you can paste it anywhere you can paste a PNG image file, such as Google Search, Messages, or even a note. When you tap Share, you’ll see options to AirDrop it, save the image to your camera roll, assign it to a contact, or add it to a new Quick Note, among other things.

Essentially, that’s it! For a little more guidance on getting the best results, here are a few tips:

• Any image saved to your camera roll is fair game – it doesn’t have to be shot with your iPhone.
• It works best with people, pets, or clearly defined objects.
• If you long-press an image and nothing happens, try again by pressing a different part of the image. If multiple attempts fail, it probably isn’t a good candidate for cropping images.