You’ve seen it on countless police procedurals. You’ve watched Jack Black do it in the movies. And a year ago, Google promised it was coming to the Pixel 8 Pro. Now, the company behind Android is finally letting you “zoom in and enhance” your photos.
Yes, the TV and movie trope that’s been mocked for decades for being unrealistic is now available in your pocket, kind of. A year late, “Zoom Enhance” is rolling out today on the Pixel 8 Pro, and arriving on all Pixel 9 phones at launch.
The company didn’t say much new about how exactly it’ll work, but judging by the initial announcement, Zoom Enhance will automatically display an “Enhance” button when you zoom in on an already captured photo. According to today’s blog post, your phone then “fills in the gaps between pixels and predicts fine details for high-quality, post-capture zoom results.” Which is to say, it makes its best guess. Presumably, your Pixel would then save the enhanced image as a separate photo, though I have yet to receive the feature on my own Pixel 8 Pro, so I can’t say for sure.
During last year’s Made by Google keynote, Google Senior Vice President of Devices & Services Rick Osterloh pitched Zoom Enhance as “the kind of zoom enhancement you used to see in science fiction,” but “right in the phone in your hand.”
In reality, the trick is more akin to Adobe’s Generative Fill, which invents imagery out of whole cloth that the AI thinks kind of matches your photo. Please don’t attempt to play internet detective using zoom enhance—the feature doesn’t reveal more of the original image, but rather doodles vaguely similar pixels on top of it.
That’s not to say it isn’t cool, but it joins dozens of other computational photography tricks in blurring the line between photos and fiction. For now, you can continue to make fun of TV detectives using “zoom in and enhance” without getting egg on your face.
We’ll have to wait until the feature’s been around for a bit to gauge how many liberties it takes with our photos. The example provided today by Google (seen above) wasn’t too impressive—the “enhanced” images look almost identical to the originals, with blur still visible throughout.