One of the new features in iOS 15 may be the ability to improve iPhone photos by removing the ugly green flare sometimes seen in photos through post-processing.

The discovery was made by user Doubleluckstur on Reddit's r/iOSBeta page (via The Verge), who was using an unknown iPhone running a developer beta version of iOS 15. This would be a wonderful quality of life improvement for all iOS 15-enabled devices, including the upcoming iPhone 13. However, older iPhone users may find they cannot use it even if they can update to iOS 15, according to other users who have tried to recreate the trick.

Flare, an image artifact caused by bright light causing reflections in the lens, will still be visible through the viewfinder when lining up shots. However, when the final image is viewed on screen or later in a photo application, you will see that the effect has been reduced or eliminated. This effect seems to be exacerbated by certain backgrounds, such as leaves, mesh screens, and artificial light sources.

When Live Photo is taken, the main image selected by Apple's software will have the most flare reduction, while other frames will have reduced processing. This feature does not seem to affect video at all so far.

So far, this feature has been confirmed to work on the iPhone XS, iPhone 11 series, and iPhone 12 series. Older models do not appear to be able to use this feature so far. This can be tracked because all of these devices use the Apple A12 Bionic chip or later, which is a requirement for other features in the iOS 15 beta.

Features that appear in the beta version of the operating system are not guaranteed to make it to the stable release version. We hope this one remains with the iPhone 13 until iOS 15 is officially released to the public this fall. Flares like this are a common problem for iPhone photographers and removing them would be a great benefit.