How far can you, or rather, should you push an image through editing? It’s a bit of a philosophical debate that I’ve previously dabbled in and ranted against. But the fact of the matter is AI is everywhere and is a critical part of modern computational photography. Increasingly though, AI is becoming a part of the post-photography experience too. And Google is leading the charge here. Two years ago, the company introduced Magic Eraser with the Pixel 6. The seemingly magical object removal experience made it a cinch to eliminate errant objects, people, and more with a single tap.
But removing objects is just one aspect of photo editing. Google’s upcoming Magic Editor promises a whole lot more. This year, at Google I/O, the company debuted a slew of upgrades to the built-in photo editor app on Pixel hardware. The updated app promises to use a combination of generative AI and semantic segmentation to ease up experiences like moving objects around within a frame, resizing them, changing the color of the sky, and more.