Incredible gentleness of AI photography

Skógafoss it’s a must-see, everyone said, and in a country with as much natural beauty as Iceland that means it’s going to be some majestic shit. The waterfall did not disappoint, but even on a cool March weekday, the place was packed with people. My photos – and come on, you To have take photos – it was full of tourists in puffy coats, everyone taking photos of the waterfalls. Not exactly what you print and hang on the wall.

A few months later I saw the photo the same waterfall appears on the screen at Google’s annual developer conference, where the company demonstrated its recent AI-powered Magic Editor. In this version, a fluffy tourist stood in front of the falls on a gray day. CEO Sundar Pichai discusses the changes appearing on screen. The sky turns blue, the woman is changed, her outfit is improved. Pichai mentions using this tool to “get rid of the clouds” and brighten the scene to make it look “as sunny as you remember.”

Phone makers have been emphasizing blue skies and glossy skin for years, but the latest batch of pixels, galaxies and iPhones employ artificial intelligence to manipulate photos even further. Magic Editor on Pixel 9 includes a recent option called “Reimagine.” Now, instead of simply erasing or moving objects, you can add things with just a text prompt. Replace background; sprinkle some rainbows and butterflies. It is used to create a scene that you Remembernot presenting the scene exactly as you saw it, or at least that’s what Pixel camera premier Isaac Reynolds said Wire earlier this year. These are memories, not photos.

The thing about photos is that they are merciless. Photos tend to show us things that we would otherwise dismiss – what we have learned to ignore in person shows up in photos as a glaring distraction. In one of my favorite photos of my son from last year, he is sitting on the couch in our living room wearing a fireman’s hat and laughing at something with pure joy on his face.

But there is a problem with our couch, which is literally falling apart after years of enduring cat claws. My brain has long since tuned out the frayed upholstery, but when I look at this photo, my eyes immediately go to the imperfections. The ability to remove distractions and focus on the subject is quite appealing, even for a photo purist like me. But can it really be called a photo at this point?

The whole thing gets incredibly messy the more you try to figure out the definition of the photo. But as an exercise, I decided to put the tools to the test and force myself into a mindset of capturing memories rather than photos. Do I like the images I came up with? Would I feel comfortable even calling them photos? Over the weekend, I took the Pixel 9 Pro on family adventures, took even more photos than I usually take as a family photographer, and then spent some time editing them in Google Photos using these AI tools. As a side note, I edited some older photos to see if AI could actually bring my photos closer to my memories.

When are the photos mood and not photos, you can add whatever you want to them – as long as it serves the memory. Maybe I’m not very imaginative, or maybe the “reimagine” tool is just a bridge too far in this exercise, but I had a strenuous time finding uses for it. I added a flock of birds to the sky in a photo of my child running through a field. I think it looks believable and nice. But if it’s a good photo, it’s probably because the lightweight was really nice and my kid had a gigantic smile on his face – not because of the AI ​​birds.

I switched gears and focused on using the less nihilistic tools in the AI ​​toolkit in Google Photos. During the “taking photos of, er, memories” part of the exercise, I forced myself to take photos that I would normally leave out: a stranger lingering in the frame or a huge mess in the background. And you know what? AI is really good at fixing things like this.

As part of recording “memories”, I cut out from my images what did not serve my memory of a given scene. At first, when I looked at my photos, it was strenuous for me to even see some of these things; they looked the way they looked because that’s what it was there. What about the black strap of the diaper bag on my husband’s shoulder? I don’t think I particularly remember it because it’s something some of us always carry with us when we go on trips. After a few taps it disappeared from the picture and I would never have known the difference.

And while taking a whole crowd of people out of the waterfall scene didn’t improve the recall of my photo, I found the Magic Editor much more useful for taking one or two people out of the frame. Three-year-olds are small humans who tend to be uncooperative if you’re waiting for the perfect moment to take a photo – including waiting for someone to step out of the background of my photo. Magic Editor convinced me that I could take these photos anyway and just delete people after the fact.

It’s also possible to go too far with cleaning. I removed the trash can from the background of a photo of my son on the playground. But why stop there? I used Reimagine to demolish the building housing the toilets and replace it with trees. The resulting photo is completely convincing and public toilets are certainly not a major part of my memory of that day. But the photo is also more general, more uninteresting. We could be at any playground in the greater Seattle area, or maybe the entire country. I left the building.

This was my overwhelming impression throughout the entire experiment. There are plenty of things I don’t mind removing from a photo, like the dried snot under my kid’s nose or the mouse droppings littering the sidewalk he’s standing on. But it’s very simple to cross the line and take so much out of an image that you actually remove the context and imperfections that gave it its character.

This exercise also confirmed my belief that it is impossible to turn a bad photo into a good one. Trust me, I’ve spent many hours trying over the years. However, this applies to time-honored photo editing and crazy AI tools; good lighting and well-thought-out composition will do much more for the photo than any tinkering in Photoshop.