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Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Google Pixel 4 ‘Feature Drop’ brings post-capture Portrait Blur and more

10 Dec

Google’s Pixel phones run the company’s Android operating system in its ‘purest’ form which also means they are the first devices to receive Android updates. Now Google has released its first ‘Feature Drop’ for the Pixel 4 and given us an overview in a blog post.

From an imaging point of view, the most interesting new feature is the ability to add a simulated bokeh effect post-capture, even if the image wasn’t originally shot in the Pixel’s Portrait mode. This means using Google Photos you can now add background blur to images that were shot a long time before bokeh simulation even was a thing.

On the downside, we would expect subject segmentation to be less precise than on images shot in Portrait Mode as the feature won’t have any depth data to work with and solely relies on subject recognition.

Other new features include an option for automatic Call Screen for robocalls and spam calls. Google Assistant can detect spam calls and silence them. Then it will screen the call to see if it might actually be worth your while. Google says it will also provide a ‘helpful context about who is calling and why.’

In addition, the video-calling app Google Duo can now auto-frame your face using the Pixel’s wide-angle selfie camera and expand the frame if a second person joins the caller. Google also says it has improved the Pixel 4’s memory management.

All new features will roll out ‘soon’ to Pixel users and at least some of them are likely to at some point appear on other Android devices as well. You can find the full list of new features on the Google Blog.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Google Photos gets new private conversations sharing feature on mobile and Web

04 Dec

Google has pushed out yet another big update for its Google Photos mobile platform, this time adding messaging support. In an announcement on its blog today, Google explained that users have requested an easier way to quickly share individual images with friends and family, something now made possible with the addition of sharing in private conversations.

Until now, Google Photos users had two options for sharing images and videos from the app: by either creating a new album that featured only one image and sharing the link with another person or downloading the image and sharing it using a dedicated messaging app like Messenger or WhatsApp. Both methods are too clunky and time consuming for many users.

Google says the new private conversations feature will arrive on iOS, Android, and the Web. Once available, users will be able to directly share individual images and videos within Google Photos by tapping the ‘Share’ icon located below the content followed by selecting the recipient’s contact from the resulting menu. Users can send chats alongside the images and videos. The feature supports group chats and reactions.

Google says the new sharing option isn’t meant to replace dedicated messaging apps; rather, it is simply designed to make sharing content from Google Photos very simple. Recipients can download shared content from private conversations and save the content to their own galleries. The feature will roll out ‘gradually’ to users over the next week.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Google Photos starts rolling out manual face tagging feature on mobile

03 Dec

As promised this past summer by Google Product Lead David Lieb, Google Photos has been updated to support manual face tagging. The feature first started rolling out to some users last week, according to Android Police, only days after XDA spotted signs of the new feature in an app teardown. The feature still has not arrived for all users, however.

Manual face tagging is a new Google Photos feature that builds upon the service’s existing face-detection algorithm. With this new tool, users are able to manually correct errors made by the algorithm and to also immediately tag images of new people who haven’t yet been identified by the app.

Users who have access to the feature note one big limitation with the new tool: the app does not allow users to tag faces that weren’t detected by the algorithm. As well, it isn’t yet clear whether manually tagging people and correcting mistakes will help improve the algorithm’s ability to detect those people in subsequent photos.

Users who have access to the new manual face tagging option can find the tool within the Google Photos app’s ‘Albums’ menu. Tap on ‘People & Pets,’ then tap on an image. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to reveal the menu containing EXIF data, then swipe up again.

The person featured in the image will be listed under a section title ‘People.’ If you have access to the manual face tagging feature, you will see a new pen icon located next to the person within this ‘People’ section. Android Police notes that this feature is rolling out through a server-side update, meaning that users can’t manually update the app to get access to the new tagging option.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Facebook rolling out new tool to transfer your Facebook photos to Google Photos

03 Dec

In 2018, Facebook announced its participation in the Data Transfer Project, a collaboration between tech giants Apple, Google, Microsoft and Twitter designed to make it easier for users of online services to move data securely and easily between those services.

Facebook is now getting the Data Transfer Project moving by announcing an open-source tool that lets you move all your Facebook photos to Google Photos. For now the tool is only available to some users in Ireland but should be available globally in early 2020.

Facebook also says the tool will work with other services which are likely Apple’s iCloud and Microsoft’s OneDrive.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Google explains its Night Sight astrophotography mode in detail

27 Nov

Ever since Google launched its Night Sight feature on the Pixel 3 series the low light photography feature has been very popular with users. On the new Pixel 4 Google has updated Night Sight with a specific mode for astrophotography. The team behind it has now authored a blog post to explained the function in more detail.

In order to capture as much light as possible without using shutter speeds that would require a tripod and/or lead to blur on any moving subject, Night Sight splits the exposure across multiple frames that are aligned to compensate for camera shake and in-scene motion. In a second step the frames are averaged to reduce noise and increase image detail.

The astrophotography feature uses the same approach in principle but uses longer exposure times for individual frames and therefore relies on tripod use or some other kind of support.

Image with hot pixels (left) and the corrected version (right)

The team decided exposure times of individual frames should not be longer than 16 seconds to make the stars look like points of light rather than streaks. The team also found that most users were not patient enough to wait longer than four minutes for a full exposure. So the feature uses a maximum of 15 frames with up to 16 seconds exposure time per frame.

At such long exposure times hot pixel can become a problem. The system identifies them by comparing neighboring pixels within the same frame as well as across a sequence of frames recorded for a Night Sight image. If an outlier is detected its value is replaced by an average.

In addition the feature uses AI to identify the sky in night images and selectively darken it for image results that are closer to the real scene than what you would achieve with a conventional long exposure.

This image was captured under the lighting of a full moon. The left half shows the version without any sky processing applied. On the right the sky has been slightly darkened for a more realistic result, without affecting the landscape elements in the frame.

Night Sight is not only about capture, though, it also includes a special viewfinder that is optimized for shooting in ultra-low light. When the shutter is pressed each individual long-exposure frame is displayed as it is captured, showing much more detail than the standard preview image. The composition can then be corrected and a new Night Sight shot triggered.

Some of the results we have seen have been impressive. For more more technical detail head over to the original post on the Google blog. A n album of full-size sample images can be found here. The team has also put together a helpful guide for using the feature in pdf format.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Google Photos is rolling out image markup tool for annotating on the go

25 Nov

A few weeks ago new Google Photos features, including an image markup feature, were discovered by a Twitter user in the app code but had not been activated yet.

Now Google is officially rolling out the markup feature and it should be available globally on Android devices in the near future. The company has already amended its editing instructions for Google Photos accordingly.

The tool lets you draw on your images, choosing from several colors and two-line types, a marker or a brush. Those users who already have the function available can access it via an icon within the editing toolbar at the bottoms of the app UI.

Overall, this looks like a very simple tool that’s not meant to be used for any complex image editing but will certainly be helpful in certain situations. The feature has not arrived on any of our devices yet but let us know in the comments if you’ve been able to try it out.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Pixel peeping the everyday: Explore our Google Pixel 4 sample gallery

29 Oct

Google’s Pixel 4 promises many clever benefits thanks to computational photography, but what does that mean when you go out and shoot with it?

We’ve been using a Pixel 4 as our always-with-us camera for the past week, trying out many of the modes and unique features available to it, including ‘Night Sight’, ‘Dual Exposure Controls’, and multiple zoom ratios. We’ve captioned each image with the mode it was shot in. Have a look at what the results look like.

We’ve also included Raw files for download, which are the result of Google’s burst photography modes with its robust align and merge algorithms.

$ (document).ready(function() { SampleGalleryV2({“containerId”:”embeddedSampleGallery_0674242834″,”galleryId”:”0674242834″,”isEmbeddedWidget”:true,”selectedImageIndex”:0,”isMobile”:false}) });

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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iPhone users get free unlimited Google Photo storage for original photo files, for now, while Pixel 4 owners have to pay up

22 Oct

All Android phones running Google apps come with free Google Photos cloud storage for images and videos captured with the device. However, image and video files are not stored at original quality. Instead, they are compressed to what Google calls ‘high quality’. Users who prefer to store their original out-of-camera files in the cloud have to shell out for one of Google’s storage plans.

On its own Pixel device, Google has in the past made an exception. Users of the Pixel 3 and previous Pixel devices could store unlimited original files for life, but this perk has ended with the brand new Pixel 4. Users of the latest Google flagship will just be treated like users of any other Android phone.

Now it seems the only ones benefiting from Google’s free unlimited storage for original photos are actually the users of one of Apple’s recent iPhones. Reddit user u/stephenvsawyer discovered that images in the HEIC/HEIF format, which recent iPhones use by default, will be stored without any compression.

A screenshot from Google’s Pixel 2 promotional page captured at the time of the release showing the no-longer-current benefit of getting unlimited storage of original files for free.

The reason for this is pretty simple: if Google tried to compress the images, the file size would actually increase. So the decision to save original HEIC/HEIF files to its cloud platform saves Google both storage space on its servers and computing power. It’s worth noting that this only applies to photos. iPhone videos are saved at 1080p resolution, even if they were recorded at 4K settings.

The latest version of the Android OS, Android 10, technically supports the HEIC/HEIF format, but Pixel 4 devices don’t currently offer this option. So, at least for now, iPhone users are actually getting more out of Google Photos than users of Google’s own flagship phone.

In a statement made to Android Police, Google said ‘We are aware of this bug and are working to fix it.’ What exactly this ‘fix’ entails remains to be seen, but there’s a good chance this iPhone loophole could get closed down in the near future.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Google ends free ‘original quality’ image backups for the Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL

20 Oct

The newly unveiled Google Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL smartphones will not include three years of free ‘original quality’ Google Photos storage, the company has confirmed. Details about the change were quietly listed on the Google Store’s Pixel 4 product page following the company’s press event on Tuesday, revealing an elimination of the perk Google has offered since the launch of its original Pixel model.

All Android mobile devices come with free Google Photos storage for images and videos captured with the handset, but there’s a catch: the content is compressed from its original quality down to ‘high quality.’

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The Pixel smartphone line has remained notable among its peers by offering atypically excellent camera quality, particularly in low-light environments. Before the Pixel 4, Google relied on computational photography, not extra lenses, to give its phones an edge. This time around, however, Google has taken steps to remain competitive with Apple by packing more than one camera into its newly unveiled Pixel 4 devices.

Many consumers, particularly photographers who prefer Android over iOS, have anticipated the launch of this phone specifically for its mobile camera capabilities. That makes Google’s decision to end its free ‘original quality’ photo storage particularly baffling. Buyers must either sign up for a paid storage plan or settle for compressed backups.

As recently noted by XDA, the Google Store’s Pixel 4 page reads, ‘Never worry about storing, finding, or sharing your memories thanks to unlimited storage in high quality on Google Photos.’ That feature comes with a small disclaimer that states:

Google Photos offers free unlimited online storage for all photos and videos uploaded in high quality. Photos and videos uploaded in high quality may be compressed or resized. Requires Google Account. Data rates may apply.

Google offers multiple cloud storage plans under its Google One subscription, which starts at $ 1.99/month for 100GB of storage if you pay annually. The Pixel 4 smartphone is available to preorder from the Google Storage now for $ 799.

Update (October 16, 2019): Corrected pricing of the entry-level Google One subscription plan.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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