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Last year, I spoke with Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at MIT Media Lab, about computational photography and digital photo alteration. His words now sound prescient. Companies are making an assumption that “most consumers would like to just take a photo, click a button, and get something they really would like to see, whether it matches the reality or not,” Raskar said. Say you reach Paris, and the Eiffel Tower is in a haze. “What you would like is to take a photo with your family with the Eiffel Tower in the back as if it’s a bright sunny day, right? If somebody can paste a bright, sunny photo of the Eiffel Tower behind your family, you’ll be pretty happy about it.”
This is now easier than ever with Magic Editor. There’s also a chance you’ll come across more nefarious, distorted images that might subtly massage the truth of a scene, not unlike the AI-generated viral images of Donald Trump that circulated over the summer. There’s some hope for truth seekers, as Google says the metadata will note whether Magic Editor was employed. It’s easy to strip metadata from images though, so it’s unclear how effective this will be.
Best Take
We’ve all taken group photos where someone is looking away or has their eyes closed. Best Take is going to let parents of active kids breathe a sigh of relief (while perhaps also inducing mild panic).
When you capture a photo on most smartphones, they’re actually snapping multiple images at different exposures, which is how you can get well-exposed photos in various kinds of lighting. Google’s solution to fix someone’s closed eyes is to snag another frame from what it has captured and replace the person’s face with one where their eyes are open.
This is not unlike a feature Google introduced years ago called Top Shot, which suggests a potentially better frame from the series of photos captured when you tap the shutter button. However, Best Take can pull a frame from a series of up to six photos taken within seconds of each other—handy if whoever took the photo snapped multiple images in a row.
I watched as the spokesperson selected a person’s face and cycled through other versions of the face from recent images and other frames. Just choose the face you want (a weird sentence to write) to complete your perfect group photo. Google assured me it is not generating any facial expressions but is instead using an on-device face recognition algorithm (Google Photos can already detect familiar faces) to match images up.
Audio Magic Eraser
Magic Eraser removes stuff you don’t want to see in your photos. Now, with the Pixel 8 series, it can also eliminate sounds you don’t want to hear.
In one of my demos, I saw a video of someone playing a cello at a park. In the background? A siren going off in the distance (classic New York City). With Audio Magic Eraser, you can edit the clip and split the sounds up to completely remove the frequencies of the siren. The result is a video with just the sounds of a cello. It was pretty remarkable. This also means you can cut the sound of the cello and just play the siren, so you do you.
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