New Google Photos editor makes it easier to tweak images on the go

During Google’s Pixel 5 reveal event, the company also snuck in a small update to the Google Photos app.

If you don’t edit any pictures within the photos app, you’ll likely never notice this minor change, but if you do, you’ll be glad Google finally paid attention to this often forgotten Photos feature.

Now, when you open the editor, Google presents suggested edits like an auto-enhance and a black and white portrait filter or its interesting ‘Colour Pop’ functionality. This Colour Pop button is cool since Google previously had this as an automatic feature that users couldn’t enable themselves. Google says in the coming months, even more automatic edits are going to come to this section of the app.

I think this is a smart way to add AI enhancements to phones since it allows users to retain their original copy of the photo they edit. Other company’s like Huawei and Samsung do some AI enhancement in the camera app, and I’d argue that’s a little less useful for people who prefer unaltered images.

Google has also made the editing controls more granular, so they’re easier to adjust than the old slider-based version. Overall this makes the app a lot more useful for editing.

Google’s two new phones, the Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5, are also getting a feature called ‘Portrait Light’ that allows users to add a subtle lighting effect to a person’s face in an image. Google says this will roll back to more Pixel phones soon, but it didn’t share what phones specifically.

The update is rolling out today, according to Google, but so far, none of our Android phones have it, so it might take some time.

Source: Google