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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• AI Enhance aims to improve the lighting, color, and framing of a photo.
• The goal is to reduce the manual steps you may take to fix a bad photo.
• Unveiled last year, the tool is rolling out to all Android users worldwide.

I sometimes struggle trying to fix a photo with dark lighting, off colors, or poor framing. I might fiddle with the controls for brightness, contrast, color, cropping, and more. And even then, I still might not achieve the results I want. Now, Google Photos offers an option for all Android users also trying to improve a bad photo.

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AI Enhance is an editing tool in Google Photos that uses AI to try to enhance your photos. The goal is to balance both the lighting and the color of a photo so you don’t have to tweak each one individually. But it doesn’t stop there. This tool also aims to crop and straighten the photo, as well as sharpen a cropped area.

The feature popped up last year but now is rolling to all Android users around the world, a post from the Google Photos account announced on Monday.

How to try Google AI Enhance

To try it, first make sure you’re running the latest version of the Google Photos app on your Android device. Open the app and tap a photo that you’d like to fix or improve. Tap the Edit icon at the bottom, and you should see a button that says AI Enhance.

If you don’t see it, make sure you’ve updated Google Photos on your phone. You may also need to restart your device. I initially found it only on my Google Pixel phone and not on the Motorola or Samsung devices that I use for testing. But after updating and restarting them, the AI Enhance button finally appeared.

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Tap that AI Enhance button and wait a few seconds for the tool to do its stuff. Your image is regenerated with the lighting, color, framing, and cropping all potentially adjusted. To give you a few choices, the app displays three enhanced images, all with different color and cropping changes. You can easily crop any of them directly.

Tap each of the three to see which you prefer. Tap the last one you selected to go back to your original photo. You can then compare and contrast the original with the three modified images by tapping each one individually.

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Select one of the enhanced versions, and a Save as Copy button appears at the top. Tap that button to save the new version as a copy, so you won’t lose the original. You’re then able to better compare the original with the new one by swiping between them. You can always delete the one you don’t want to keep.

My results

I took AI Enhance for a spin and generally was happy with the results. In most cases, the changes did improve the overall quality of the photo. In other cases, though, the adjustments didn’t work as well. That was especially true with the cropping. The AI typically wants to tighten the framing of the photos, but that sometimes eliminated peripheral elements that I wanted to keep.

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Of course, this is always the case with generative AI, especially when working with your photos. In this instance, I may want the framing or the lighting in a particular photo to look unusual or artistic, while the AI is focused on creating a generically perfect image. But that’s why you still have manual controls.

The Photos app offers Enhance and Dynamic options that can improve the lighting of a photo without cropping it. And you can still turn to the individual controls to sharpen or crop an image, and the always handy Magic Eraser to remove unwanted elements.