Our recently announced 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. Here’s a look at 10 new things Pixel Camera can do and how we made them happen.

1. Take great shots of everyone — no matter their skin tone.

Real Tone makes our camera work more equitably for people of every skin tone. With the help of partners around the world, we’ve created over 10,000 new portraits on Pixel 7 to improve Real Tone, and we’ve worked with Diversify Photo to evaluate our progress. Thanks to them, Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro have the most inclusive smartphone camera.[d191a5]

2. Snap a selfie with confidence.

For people who are blind or low-vision, Guided Frame provides a combination of audio cues with high-contrast animations and haptic feedback — that slight vibration you feel when tapping things on your phone — to help capture a selfie.

3. Remove blur from old, blurry photos.

Now with Photo Unblur in Google Photos you can bring your blurry photos back to life and make your most treasured shots look as great as you remember — even if you took them on a different camera.

4. Low light, no problem.

In the darkest scenes, Night Sight photos are sharper than ever. Using updates to HDR+ with Bracketing and new ML techniques to reduce noise, your low-light photos will have less motion blur since exposures can be half as long as before.[341905]So go ahead and capture those nighttime portraits, city nightscapes and more.

5. Get creative with a wider lens and Macro Focus.

The Pixel 7 Pro has an upgraded ultrawide lens that is 21% wider than Pixel 7’s so you can fit more in the frame. Plus the ultrawide lens has autofocus, which powers Macro Focus. Simply move your phone close to your subject — like a flower — and the camera will automatically transition from the main camera to the ultrawide. This will allow Pixel 7 Pro to focus on a subject as close as three centimeters away, making small objects look life-size.

6. Find the perfect composition with high-quality zoom options.

Super Res Zoom uses the inner crop of the 50-megapixel sensor, remosaicing, and HDR+ with Bracketing to create 12.5MP photos at 2x on both Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. The 2x photos are sharp with low noise and high resolution — similar to what a dedicated 2x telephoto camera would capture.[f741a2]

7. Zoom in even farther.

On the Pixel 7 Pro, the new 48-megapixel telephoto camera kicks in at 5x zoom, and Super Res Zoom — which uses the same process as above — creates stunning 12-megapixel photos at 10x, which look similar to what you’d get with a 10x optical zoom camera.[f741a2]At 15x and beyond, you can take handheld photos without a tripod with Zoom Stabilization, which uses many of Pixel’s advances in video stabilization to keep the phone steady. Instead of trying to tame your natural hand movements – which can turn small changes into large swings in the viewfinder – you can focus on composing and taking the perfect photo. At 20x, Google Tensor G2 powers a new machine learning upscaler that increases your photo’s resolution even more, resulting in zoom photos up to 30x on Pixel 7 Pro — the furthest zoom magnification ever on a Pixel.

8. Get the in-between shot.

But sometimes the perfect composition calls for a zoom magnification that’s in between your smartphone’s optical cameras (1x and 5x for Pixel 7 Pro). What if you want a high-quality photo at 3x or 4x on Pixel 7 Pro? Traditionally, smartphone cameras perform digital zoom to cover these zoom magnifications, and this frequently results in lower-quality photos. To help you get great photos — even between the lenses — Pixel 7 Pro combines the next generation of Super Res Zoom’s 2x camera technologies described above, bonafide super resolution techniques, and a new ML model, which fills in the innermost section of the photo with detail from the 5x telephoto camera. The result is stunning photos – even if you’re taking them at 3x or 4x, which is before Pixel 7 Pro’s 5x telephoto lens would normally kick in.

9. Shoot even better videos.

Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 7 can record in 4K60 FPS on all of the cameras — even the front one — while also using Speech Enhancement to isolate the person speaking, as if they had a lapel mic. With so many improvements and refinements to video, including our third version of Active Stabilization, Pixel is an amazing tool for creators to achieve cinematic video, audio, and color in all kinds of lighting. Give the new Cinematic Blur mode a whirl, which uses similar technology as Portrait Mode to artfully blur the background in videos to keep your audience’s attention on the subject, or try capturing your memories in 10-bit HDR video, which is the perfect format for sunsets and fashion shoots with its smooth color gradients and high contrast. ‘

10. Share your videos.

We’ve partnered with Snap so you can capture ultrawide front and rear photos and videos, and your videos will use video stabilization. Plus, you can use a new feature called Dual — that’s only on Pixel 7 and select Android phones — to simultaneously record video on your front and rear cameras to capture yourself and the scene in front of you.

Our recently announced 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. Here’s a look at 10 new things Pixel Camera can do and how we made them happen.

1. Take great shots of everyone — no matter their skin tone.

Real Tone makes our camera work more equitably for people of every skin tone. With the help of partners around the world, we’ve created over 10,000 new portraits on Pixel 7 to improve Real Tone, and we’ve worked with Diversify Photo to evaluate our progress. Thanks to them, Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro have the most inclusive smartphone camera.[d191a5]

2. Snap a selfie with confidence.

For people who are blind or low-vision, Guided Frame provides a combination of audio cues with high-contrast animations and haptic feedback — that slight vibration you feel when tapping things on your phone — to help capture a selfie.

3. Remove blur from old, blurry photos.

Now with Photo Unblur in Google Photos you can bring your blurry photos back to life and make your most treasured shots look as great as you remember — even if you took them on a different camera.

4. Low light, no problem.

In the darkest scenes, Night Sight photos are sharper than ever. Using updates to HDR+ with Bracketing and new ML techniques to reduce noise, your low-light photos will have less motion blur since exposures can be half as long as before.[341905]So go ahead and capture those nighttime portraits, city nightscapes and more.

5. Get creative with a wider lens and Macro Focus.

The Pixel 7 Pro has an upgraded ultrawide lens that is 21% wider than Pixel 7’s so you can fit more in the frame. Plus the ultrawide lens has autofocus, which powers Macro Focus. Simply move your phone close to your subject — like a flower — and the camera will automatically transition from the main camera to the ultrawide. This will allow Pixel 7 Pro to focus on a subject as close as three centimeters away, making small objects look life-size.

6. Find the perfect composition with high-quality zoom options.

Super Res Zoom uses the inner crop of the 50-megapixel sensor, remosaicing, and HDR+ with Bracketing to create 12.5MP photos at 2x on both Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. The 2x photos are sharp with low noise and high resolution — similar to what a dedicated 2x telephoto camera would capture.[f741a2]

7. Zoom in even farther.

On the Pixel 7 Pro, the new 48-megapixel telephoto camera kicks in at 5x zoom, and Super Res Zoom — which uses the same process as above — creates stunning 12-megapixel photos at 10x, which look similar to what you’d get with a 10x optical zoom camera.[f741a2]At 15x and beyond, you can take handheld photos without a tripod with Zoom Stabilization, which uses many of Pixel’s advances in video stabilization to keep the phone steady. Instead of trying to tame your natural hand movements – which can turn small changes into large swings in the viewfinder – you can focus on composing and taking the perfect photo. At 20x, Google Tensor G2 powers a new machine learning upscaler that increases your photo’s resolution even more, resulting in zoom photos up to 30x on Pixel 7 Pro — the furthest zoom magnification ever on a Pixel.

8. Get the in-between shot.

But sometimes the perfect composition calls for a zoom magnification that’s in between your smartphone’s optical cameras (1x and 5x for Pixel 7 Pro). What if you want a high-quality photo at 3x or 4x on Pixel 7 Pro? Traditionally, smartphone cameras perform digital zoom to cover these zoom magnifications, and this frequently results in lower-quality photos. To help you get great photos — even between the lenses — Pixel 7 Pro combines the next generation of Super Res Zoom’s 2x camera technologies described above, bonafide super resolution techniques, and a new ML model, which fills in the innermost section of the photo with detail from the 5x telephoto camera. The result is stunning photos – even if you’re taking them at 3x or 4x, which is before Pixel 7 Pro’s 5x telephoto lens would normally kick in.

9. Shoot even better videos.

Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 7 can record in 4K60 FPS on all of the cameras — even the front one — while also using Speech Enhancement to isolate the person speaking, as if they had a lapel mic. With so many improvements and refinements to video, including our third version of Active Stabilization, Pixel is an amazing tool for creators to achieve cinematic video, audio, and color in all kinds of lighting. Give the new Cinematic Blur mode a whirl, which uses similar technology as Portrait Mode to artfully blur the background in videos to keep your audience’s attention on the subject, or try capturing your memories in 10-bit HDR video, which is the perfect format for sunsets and fashion shoots with its smooth color gradients and high contrast. ‘

10. Share your videos.

We’ve partnered with Snap so you can capture ultrawide front and rear photos and videos, and your videos will use video stabilization. Plus, you can use a new feature called Dual — that’s only on Pixel 7 and select Android phones — to simultaneously record video on your front and rear cameras to capture yourself and the scene in front of you.

This week the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, Google’s newest smartphones, arrive in stores. Both devices come with features like Now Playing, the Google Assistant, and the best-rated smartphone camera ever, according to DXO.

We designed Pixel 2’s camera by asking how we can make the camera in your Pixel 2 act like SLRs and other big cameras, and we’ve talked before about the tech we use to do that (such as HDR+). Today we’re highlighting a new feature for Pixel 2’s camera: portrait mode.

With portrait mode, you can take pictures of your friends and family (that includes your pets too!) that keep what’s important sharp and in focus, but softly blur out the background. This helps draw your attention to the people in your pictures and keeps you from getting distracted by what’s in the background. This works on both Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, on both the rear- and front-facing cameras.

Technically, blurring out the background like this is an effect called “shallow depth of field.” The big lenses on SLRs can be configured to do this by changing their aperture, but smartphone cameras have fixed, small apertures that produce images where everything is more or less sharp. To create this effect with a smartphone camera, we need to know which parts of the image are far away in order to blur them artificially.

Normally, to determine what’s far away with a smartphone camera you’d need to use two cameras close to each other, then triangulate the depth of various parts of the scene—just like your eyes work. But on Pixel 2 we’re able to combine computational photography and machine learning to do the same with just one camera.

How portrait mode works on the Pixel 2

Portrait mode starts with an HDR+ picture where everything is sharp and high-quality.

Next, our technology needs to decide which pixels belong to the foreground of the image (a person, or your dog) and which belong to the background. This is called a “segmentation mask” and it’s where machine learning comes in. We trained a neural network to look at a picture and understand which pixels are people and which aren’t. Because photos of people may also include things like hats, sunglasses, and ice cream cones, we trained our network on close to a million pictures—including pictures with things like those!

Just creating two layers—foreground and background, with a hard edge in between them—isn’t quite enough for all pictures you’d want to take; SLRs produce blur that gets stronger with each fraction of an inch further from the thing that’s in sharp focus. To recreate that look with Pixel 2’s rear camera, we use the new Dual Pixel sensor to look through the left and right sides of the camera’s tiny lens at the same time—effectively giving us two cameras for the price of one. Using these two views we compute a depth map: the distance from the camera to each point in the scene. Then we blur the image based on the combination of the depth map and the segmentation mask.

The result? Portrait mode.

Portrait mode works a little differently on the front-facing camera, where we aren’t able to produce a depth map the same way we do with the more powerful rear-facing camera. For selfies, we just use our segmentation mask, which works particularly well for selfies since they have simpler compositions.

When and how to use portrait mode

Portrait mode on the Pixel 2 is automatic and easy to use—just choose it from your camera menu then take your picture. You can use it for pictures of your friends, family, and even pets. You can also use it for all kinds of “close-up” shots of objects such flowers, food, or bumblebees (just don’t get stung!) with background blur.

Here are some tips for how to take great portraits using any camera (and Pixel 2 as well!):

• Stand close enough to your subjects that their head (or head and shoulders) fill the frame.
  
• For a group shot where you want everyone sharp, place them at the same distance from the camera.
  
• Put some distance between your subjects and the background.
  
• For close-up shots, tap to focus to get more control over what’s sharp and what’s blurred. Also, the camera can’t focus on things closer than several inches, so stay at least that far away.