“This is my favorite feature ever.”
It's rare for my wife to take a passing interest in my work. Our apartment is a revolving door for all kinds of gadgets, from bulky electric scooters and folding ebikes to augmented reality glasses and folding phones. Whenever I excitedly show her some unique piece of tech, she shrugs. That wasn't the case with one of the Pixel 8's features: Magic Editor.
Magic Editor is one of a few new powerful software tools Google debuted on its latest flagship smartphones, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. And these are indeed top-end phones now that Google has bumped up the price by $100 over their predecessors. At $699 and $999 respectively, they have bigger shoes to fill than their predecessors. Despite some quirks, they mostly deliver.
Magic Editor is a tool in Google Photos exclusive to the Pixel 8 series (at least, for now). Think of it as a simpler version of Photoshop that requires almost zero photo editing experience. I pulled up images of my dog and with just a tap, the software could isolate him from the background, allowing me to move him around the scene. I tried resizing him, making him gerbil-sized or scaling him up to the size of a dire wolf. The software magically replaces the texture around the subject to match the rest of the frame and spits out a few variations on the scene to choose from.
You can move subjects around inside photos, along with their shadows. Subjects can be resized or enhanced with a portrait effect. You can even change the lighting in the scene to make it look like golden hour. Some of these editing features don't show up for every photo, and there's a small learning curve to using Magic Editor, but it's nothing like learning to use Photoshop. You get the hang of it after a few edits. I spent a little too much time crafting some hilariously silly photos of my pup, but my wife desperately wanted to play around with it and sent me a batch of her own photos to use.