Highlights
- Zoom Enhance on Pixel phones can improve photo clarity when zooming in, especially in well-lit scenes with good contrast.
- This feature can also enhance super-resolution images by adding detail to cropped shots, even for moving or old blurry photos.
- Zoom Enhance is not limited to new phone shots; older photos can also benefit from upscaling up to two or three times their original quality.
Computational photography has come a long way from the days of suggested image edits and Night Sight or Astrophotography mode on Google Pixel phones. The company’s latest flagship has new tricks up its sleeve to help strengthen the sole surviving weak point of mobile photography — zooming in at the expense of clarity. Zoom Enhance on Pixel phones can help such photos with the power of on-device AI, but the feature’s creator just shared the ideal conditions and best practices for stellar results.
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Wide lenses are many photographers’ go-to choice because high-resolution image sensors afford the freedom of cropping in and re-framing your shot after the fact with unnoticeable loss of resolution or sharpness. The Pixel series has been one of our favorite Android devices for photography, but its reach is limited by the compact optics compared to interchangeable-lens cameras, and cropping in often costs you sharpness and resolution.
However, options like Photo Unblur in Google Photos lend hope, and Zoom Enhance just rolled out with Google’s Pixel 9 series. The feature’s creator and senior Googler Peyman Milanfar on X shared that you can get great results with Zoom Enhance provided images are well-lit. It isn’t designed for low-light scenes, and will benefit from sharp contrast in images.
Peyman explains you can also use Zoom Enhance for super-res image enhancement. Circling back to how you can crop in on wide shots, he says, you could take a crop that’s smaller than one megapixel and Zoom Enhance will provide an output with a higher megapixel count by filling in details between the pixels. In the example below, Peyman used a 0.33MP image and the result is a 3.2MP shot. The feature is fundamentally different from the Sharpen option in other editing utilities because it adds nonexistent detail, but some might view AI’s involvement as an unrealistic and untrue representation of the captured scenes.
Moving cars or old photos, no problem at all
The scientist goes on to demonstrate that you can also use Zoom Enhance to clean up shaky or blurry handheld shots at high zoom levels, like those shot out of a moving car. You don’t need to crop in on those 15-30x magnification images either, because the image-to-image AI diffusion model will clean up the entire image if you like, much like Unblur.
Lastly, don’t feel compelled to use Zoom Enhance only on the shots from your new phone. Although the feature is limited to the newer Pixels, Peyman reassures you that Zoom Enhance will help upscale even one-megapixel shots by a factor of two or three times. Ideally, you’ll get the best upscaling results with 12MP photos, or better.
