Your Pixel Can Finally ‘Boost and Enhance’
You’ve seen it in countless police procedurals . You’ve seen Jack Black do it in the movies. And a year ago, Googlepromised that it would appear in the Pixel 8 Pro . Now the company behind Android finally lets you ” enlarge and enhance ” your photos. Yes, the TV and movie image that has been ridiculed for decades for being unrealistic is now somewhat accessible in your pocket. A year later, Zoom Enhance is coming to the Pixel 8 Pro and will appear on all Pixel 9 phones at launch.
The company hasn’t revealed much new about how exactly it will work, but based on the initial announcement, Zoom Enhance will automatically display an “Enhance” button when you enlarge a photo you’ve already taken. According to today’s blog post, your phone then “fills in the gaps between pixels and predicts fine detail for high-quality post-shoot zoom results.” That is, he makes his best guess. Presumably your Pixel will then save the enhanced image as a separate photo, although I haven’t gotten this feature on my Pixel 8 Pro yet so I can’t say for sure.
During a keynote at the Made by Google conference last year, Google SVP of Devices and Services Rick Osterloh called Zoom Enhance “the kind of zoom enhancement you’re used to seeing in science fiction” but “right on the phone in your hands.” This trick is more similar to Adobe’s Generative Fill , which creates whole cloth images that the AI thinks somewhat matches your photo. Please don’t try to play Internet detective by using the zoom function – this function does not reveal much of the original image, but rather draws vaguely similar pixels onto it.
That’s not to say it’s not cool, but it combines dozens of other computational photography techniques , blurring the line between photographs and fiction . In the meantime, you can continue to make fun of TV detectives using the “enlarge and enhance” feature without getting egg on your face.
We’ll have to wait a little while for this feature to arrive to appreciate how much freedom it takes with our photos. The example provided by Google today (above) isn’t too impressive – the “enhanced” images look almost identical to the originals, with blur still visible throughout.