Photos shot in Portrait mode carry a "Portrait" label in the iPhone Photos app and unlock a dedicated set of edit controls absent from regular photos: an on/off portrait toggle, a depth-of-field (aperture) slider, and six selectable Portrait Lighting styles via a hexagon icon. These stack on top of the general Auto adjustment tool and a final vignette to build a subject-focused image — see Vignette as Subliminal (Should-Be-Invisible) Eye Guidance.
Edits are treated as cumulative layers, not interchangeable options: portrait-specific adjustments (lighting, depth of field) first → general Auto adjustment (then manually pull exposure/brightness back down, since Auto tends to overshoot) → vignette last (~50%) to finish concentrating attention on the subject. See Vignette as Subliminal (Should-Be-Invisible) Eye Guidance.
The two levers for directing viewer attention to a subject are adding light to it and throwing everything else out of focus. Contour Light in particular reframes "lighting" as fundamentally about shadowing — where the shadows fall matters as much as where brightness is added. This is a narrower, in-app application of the same "control the light to control the eye" idea behind Motivated Light (Restrained Secondary-Highlight Suppression).
Note: these controls only appear in the editor if Portrait mode was selected at capture time — they can't be added after the fact to a photo shot in the regular mode.
The Photos app's portrait edit view exposes depth of field as an f-stop slider (default shown as e.g. F4.5). Dragging it toward roughly f/2.8 deepens the background blur — stop before the result reads unrealistic. Portrait Mode capture itself pre-isolates the face by identifying it and blurring background detail, which is why a later face-specific pass can lean on an auto-detected mask instead of manual selection (see Lensa Auto-Masked Face Retouching (One-Slider Portrait App)).
The Studio Lighting menu offers several looks; 'Contour' (not 'Studio Light') is preferred because it accounts for the face's three-dimensionality. Apple's default intensity (50%) reads as calibrated too strong in practice — halving it to ~25% gives a more natural result.
Before any face-specific retouching, the Adjustments tab normalizes the image globally: Brilliance ~25 (brightens 'intelligently' rather than flatly), Highlights pulled down ~15 (recover blown detail), Warmth pushed toward ~50 (warmer generally reads more flattering on skin than cooler), and Tint nudged to correct a recurring green color cast on skin. This global pass is explicitly stage one of a two-stage workflow — see Global Normalize-Then-Style Baseline Before Local Masking — because the Photos app 'reaches its limit' for skin-texture work, which is why stage two moves into a dedicated face-retouching app like Lensa Auto-Masked Face Retouching (One-Slider Portrait App).