The New AI Photo Tricks on the Pixel 8 Are Blowing My Mind

Magic Editor and Audio Magic Eraser give you exciting (and kind of scary) new powers over your photos and videos.

IN ALL MY years of reviewing personal technology gadgets, I can count the number of times my jaw has dropped when learning about a new product. It’s good to be a skeptical journalist! But I failed to maintain that detachment when Google demoed a few imaging tricks on its new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones. 

Taken in a vacuum, these features are things anyone with knowledge of Photoshop or video editing software can execute. But the new Pixel phones make them accessible to everyone, which is exciting, and frankly a little scary. Let’s go through ’em. 

Magic Editor

The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro introduce a lot of AI-forward photo features, including:

• Magic Editor: Magic Editor uses generative AI to change scenery, remove distractions, and shift people around an image. For example, you could use Magic Editor to remove a photobomber from a vacation photo, or to change the background of a portrait to a more scenic location.

• Audio Magic Eraser: Audio Magic Eraser helps you separate audio tracks in a video to minimize distracting sounds. For example, you could use Audio Magic Eraser to remove the sound of traffic from a video of your child playing in the park, or to remove the sound of a dog barking from a video of your wedding ceremony.

• Best Take: Best Take lets you pick the best face for each subject in a photo when you take a series of similar images, letting you merge them into a final perfect picture. For example, you could use Best Take to get a photo where everyone's eyes are open and they're all smiling, even if one person blinked or made a funny face in one of the shots.

These new AI photo tricks are still under development, but they have the potential to revolutionize the way we take and edit photos. Magic Editor, for example, could make it possible for anyone to create professional-looking photos, even if they have no experience with photo editing software. Audio Magic Eraser could make it possible to record high-quality videos in any environment, without having to worry about distracting background noise. And Best Take could make it possible to get the perfect photo of any moment, even if people aren't cooperating.

Here are some examples of how the new AI photo tricks on the Pixel 8 could be used:

• A photographer could use Magic Editor to remove a power line from a photo of a landscape.

• A parent could use Audio Magic Eraser to remove the sound of traffic from a video of their child playing in the park.

• A couple could use Best Take to get a photo where they're both smiling and their eyes are open, even if one of them blinked or made a funny face in one of the shots.

• A social media influencer could use Magic Editor to change the background of their photos to make them more visually appealing.

• A business owner could use Best Take to get a professional-looking headshot for their website.

The possibilities are endless. The new AI photo tricks on the Pixel 8 have the potential to make it easier than ever for anyone to take and edit amazing photos.

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.

Google says the system uses machine learning to identify up to five types of common sounds, like “sirens,” “animals,” and “crowds.” It’s not going to work perfectly every time—I watched a demo of a man humming while at the beach, and when we tried to cancel the sounds of the ocean, I could still hear them cropping up here and there. 

Video Boost

This feature is a little less creepy, and more just plain impressive. Video Boost is exclusive to the Pixel 8 Pro, and you can toggle it on when you’re shooting video clips in low light or if there’s going to be a lot of action. 

A copy of your video, which can be up to 4K at 30 frames per second, is then sent over to Google’s Cloud for processing. This processing can dramatically improve stabilization, upgrade clarity, and reduce noise, and the improved clip is then sent back to your device. Depending on the video length, this could take minutes or you might have to wait overnight. 

This feature is a little less creepy, and more just plain impressive. Video Boost is exclusive to the Pixel 8 Pro, and you can toggle it on when you’re shooting video clips in low light or if there’s going to be a lot of action. 

A copy of your video, which can be up to 4K at 30 frames per second, is then sent over to Google’s Cloud for processing. This processing can dramatically improve stabilization, upgrade clarity, and reduce noise, and the improved clip is then sent back to your device. Depending on the video length, this could take minutes or you might have to wait overnight.