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| Google+ new auto-correct images, tweaking things like contrast, brightness, noise, and skin smoothing. |
Google's a long way from knocking Facebook off the Iron Throne of photography, but that doesn't mean it's afraid to make a play for that chair.
To that end, Wednesday's announcement combines the filtering know-how Google assimilated when it purchased Nik Software last September with an impressive amount of cloud-sourced automation.
"We don't delete your photos, we're giving you a head start," said Horowitz. "This is non-destructive and can be turned off," but Google's really hoping that you don't.
What the filters can do is remarkable to see in person. The Auto Highlight feature hides from your immediate view bad photos -- duplicates, out-of-focus pics, and poorly-exposed shots -- and highlighting the ones it thinks you want to see. Simply by going to your Photos page, it shows you pics that emphasize affinity in people, such as recognized family and friends, as well as landmarks and scenarios such as sunsets or mountain vistas.
Auto Enhance "fixes" those photos. It automatically corrects for basic photographic technique that have, up until now, required some advanced knowledge of image editing. Areas it focuses on include contrast and brightness, noise, focus when possible, skin softening, composition, and saturation. To see the original photo or turn off the improvements, open the image in the Google+ Photos Lightbox.
The automation relies heavily on a photo's EXIF data, but doesn't use camera body profiling yet, said Besbris. "Today we look at the exposure, the ISO, the aperture. We know that a crummy cell phone camera at night will need more processing than a DSLR."
What Google is calling "auto awesome" is a very "new Google" take on how to fun with photos. "Smile" will take several nearly-identical group photos and create one that has everybody smiling and with their eyes looking at the camera. "Pano" stitches together panorama landscape photos; "Motion" is basically an animiated GIF-maker; "Mix" creates photobooth-style shots from multiple portraits; and "HDR" automatically makes photos look like they were shot as high-dynamic range images even when they weren't.
The automatic filtering works on images as you upload them, and can handle enormous batch uploads. 500 photos from your last vacation should be no problem.
To facilitate that, Google has bumped its storage capacity to encourage you to use Google+. All users get unlimited free storage for photos up to 2048px, and 15GB storage for photos larger than that. Of course, that 15GB has to be shared with Gmail and Google Drive.
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