Last week, Google held their annual Fall event, #MadeByGoogle, where they revealed new hardware and the software experiences they will support. They did that while reminding us that they’ve been at this AI thing for a long time. Much of that prior effort has been obvious in the quality of photos the Pixel phones produce. This year was no different, with Google revealing the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro alongside two AI-forward photo editing features: Best Take and Magic Editor.
Given a series of photos taken close together, Best Take allows users to select the best face from that series for any subject in the frame. The goal is to eliminate that moment where the “best” photo of your friend group has one person mid blink and another not looking at the camera.
In Google’s own words from the keynote:
Best Take lets you use the photos you did take to get the photo you thought you took.
The UI looks simple—while viewing photo you tap on a face, get a strip of alternate faces for that subject, select the one you like most and it gets stitched into the photo you were looking at.
Very impressive.
The other feature, Magic Editor, was revealed at Google I/O earlier in the year by Sundar Pichai himself.
During his demo, Pichai said the following (emphasis added):
The photo feels a bit dark so we can improve the lighting. And maybe you want to even get rid of some clouds to make it feel as sunny as you remembered. Looking even closer, you wish you had posed so it looks like you’re really catching the water in your hand. No problem, you can adjust that.
When the feature was revisited during last week’s event, the demo transformed a photo by removing an item in the foreground, moving an object that wasn’t fully captured in the frame closer to the center (adding detail where there was none), and changing the sky from overcast to something more pleasant.
Again, very impressive.
Magic Editor’s edits aren’t about fixing technical issues—though they do help with those, too. What it seems to want to do is help you produce a photo that matches your reality rather than capturing objective reality. How we feel and what we remember don’t always match what is; Magic Editor is a tacit acknowledgement of that.
Best Take is more subtle—compressing a few slices of a moment into an ideal composite—but the theme is the same. Both features tap into our emotions as humans who are documenting our histories in real time for our family, friends, colleagues, and peers to see. Pichai’s description of Magic Editor was about how the moment felt and eliminating future regret. All this offered to us as we ride the new wave of generative AI’s capabilities.
Timely and, yes, also very impressive… but what are these images?
We take photos to preserve people, places, objects, moments—to capture memories. Memories aren’t perfect but often the faded or unreliable details don’t matter; it’s the way remembering makes us feel when we conjure the memory.
Can we exempt a photo from being real if it serves as a form of memory? What is an imperfect photo transformed into a perfect representation of a memory? Is that still a photo?