Remember those light field cameras, like the Lytro models, that went the way of the dodo, despite promising what some believe was the future of photography: cameras that can refocus pictures after they are taken? Well, smartphones – the “smart” may explain it all – can do it, or at least the new Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro can.
Bye bye, blur.#Pixel7 and #GoogleTensor G2 help ensure faces are incredibly sharp by automatically fusing images from both the main and ultrawide cameras, followed by a cutting-edge machine learning approach to even further reduce blur¹ ✨#MadeByGoogle
¹See image for info pic.twitter.com/siwwaMY8Tu
— Made by Google (@madebygoogle) October 6, 2022
The newly announced models can bring your blurry photos back to life with Photo Unblur, a Google Photos feature only on Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. According to Google, Photo Unblur uses machine learning to improve your blurry pictures — even old ones. With just a few taps, remove blur and visual noise so you can relive the moment as clearly as you remember it. And you can also touch up those photos and easily remove distractions with Magic Eraser. One word of caution for all those who think this works all the time: Google says that Photo Unblur requires Google Photos app and may not work on all image elements.
Behind all this magic is the next-generation Google Tensor G2 processor, which helps ensure faces are incredibly sharp by automatically fusing images from both the main and ultrawide cameras, followed by a cutting-edge machine learning approach to even further reduce blur.
So, now you have two Google smartphones, Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro, which can get detail back to your blurred images. But that’s not all, because they also can defocus backgrounds, thanks to the new Cinematic Blur, that lets you shoot cinema-like videos with beautiful, shallow depth-of-field. So, after introducing CinematicPan on the Pixel 6 series, Google now adds some more “cinematic” power to its smartphones.
RT @madebygoogle: Video but make it #cinema 🎥
With #CinematicBlur on #Pixel7 and Pixel 7 Pro, you can shoot cinema-like videos with a beautifully shallow depth-of-field.#MadeByGoogle pic.twitter.com/QGdcFsiVaB
— Jason Million (@JMillionNYC) October 6, 2022
The new Cinematic Blur mode uses similar technology as Portrait Mode to artfully blur the background in videos to keep your audience’s attention on the subject. Video is also getting an upgrade, with new 10-bit HDR video, which is the perfect format for sunsets and fashion shoots with its smooth color gradients and high contrast.
Google says that the new smartphones offer “an even better camera (if you can believe it)”, claiming that the camera upgrades to the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro pushes computational photography to new heights. The company points to other camera features you don’t want to miss:
- Extend your range with our next-generation Super Res Zoom up to 8x on Pixel 7 and up to 30x on Pixel 7 Pro, a feature that is not available for all camera apps or modes. When it works, you’ll be able to get sharp, quality images from a distance, so your friends will think you were courtside when you show them the pictures you took of your sports hero in action. Google claims it has also achieved optical quality similar to a dedicated 2x telephoto lens for Pixel 7 and a 10x telephoto lens for Pixel 7 Pro (based on internal benchmarks comparing top-tier smartphones) so you have the flexibility to creatively frame your shot at multiple magnifications while maintaining high quality.
- Use Pixel 7 Pro to get even closer with Macro Focus, which delivers Pixel HDR+ photo quality from as close as three centimeters away. Take photos of flower petals, raindrops, feathers and other tiny details with full sharpness and vivid color.
- For those who love to take selfies, but are blind or low-vision, Google has a new feature, Guided Frame, which uses a combination of precise audio guidance, high-contrast visual animations and haptic feedback to allow for selfies to be captured, “because selfies should be for everyone”, says Google.
- Google has also made updates to the things you already love about Pixel’s camera, Google’s most inclusive camera to date. Real Tone’s camera algorithms have been trained with more than 10,000 additional portraits of people of color from our image expert partners to make sure that Pixel Camera consistently renders skin tones authentically. With this, we’ve improved Real Tone to work in low-light settings including Night Sight. And Night Sight now only needs half of the normal exposure time to produce beautiful low-light images that are sharper than before.
Google claims that the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones deliver the best photo and video experience we’ve ever had on a Pixel phone. There’s a lot of hardware, software and machine learning that go into our computational photography features. If you want to know more about all the things the Pixel Camera can do, just follow the link to an article explaining it all.