Google Photo’s newest photo editor now offers radical new techniques to improve the quality of even your oldest images.
Google Photos now uses innovative home-grown algorithms to improve image quality
Google Photos image enhancement features, both automatic and manual, add significant value to the platform for its billions of users. Now, a new Google AI Blog post explains how its newly-developed techniques enable Google Photos to get the best quality out of your photos, even those taken in less-than-ideal conditions and on older cameras.
Available in the recently upgraded Google Photos editor, Google has developed new algorithms for dealing with excess noise (or graininess) and image blur in photos. These are two of the biggest factors affecting image quality and the new algorithms are tuned specifically to run at high speed, even on limited smartphone hardware.
The methods are designed to work regardless of what camera originally shot the photos and can therefore provide upgraded picture quality to all Google Photos users. It also means you may now be able to re-visit older photos, shot on inferior camera hardware, and significantly improve their image quality using the Sharpen and Denoise tools in the new editor.
The Denoise function uses an innovative multi-level ‘pull-push’ method which requires only modest computing resources to remove noise in a fraction of a second while preserving fine details.
The Sharpen function, on the other hand, uses a new and counter-intuitive “reblurring” technique called Polyblur which removes common instances of mild blurring by repeatedly applying a controlled blur effect to restore the original image.
Full details on both the techniques can be found in the Google AI Blog post, while a sample gallery of before and after images can be found in this album.
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