Do you know how to use Adobe Photoshop, the world’s greatest image-editing application? It’s highly complex for beginners and requires hours of skills to make advanced levels of editing to your favourite vacation photographs. Thankfully, in a world where generative AI has solutions to most of our complex issues.
You no longer need to spend hours learning and perfecting your image editing skills. With tools like Magic Editor on Google Photos, you can make pro levels of editing on your phone while sipping your morning tea.
The Magic Editor from Google is one of humanity’s greatest gifts since the Photoshop application’s advent in 1990. Presented as one of the hero features of Google Photos, Magic Editor lets you utilise the power of generative AI to make substantial changes to images without dealing with complex tools and a full-fledged computer with advanced graphics processing capabilities.
It was introduced on the Google Pixel 8 series and was later released to everyone with a Google One subscription. In the coming weeks, Magic Editor will be available for free to use for everyone, although it will allow limited edits per month.
In many ways, it truly is magical for those who love editing their photos before posting on social media.
However, we are still witnessing the early stages of generative AI and as a result, you can only rely on them as tools. Google may promise easy fixes for all kinds of photos but we humans still need our genius and skills to get around Gen-AI’s early limitations that result in imperfections.
So, if you have decided to use Magic Editor for tweaking your summer holiday photos, we have a few useful tips on how to use the Magic Editor in Google Photos to get the best out of it.
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7 simple tips to make the most of Google’s AI photo editor
1. Choose the right photo
Most of Google’s promotional images used in their marketing campaigns feature clear and well-defined subjects with simpler backgrounds. The Magic Editor is comfortable only when your photo has fewer complexities for the algorithms to understand.
Hence, we recommend you use less complex images for editing via the Magic Editor. Try sticking to photos that have clear skies, simpler backgrounds with fewer complex textures and are shot in good lighting.
2. Blur the background to hide inaccuracies
Let’s say you had to use Magic Editor on a complex photograph of your kids playing on the beach and you are desperately trying to mask the ghost effect left by the Magic Eraser behind them but your efforts go in vain. Don’t panic as we have an easy hack. Simply blur the background.
Scroll through the edit option and choose to blur the background. This way, the blurring will mask the ghostly effect without ruining the photo and the moment it celebrates.
3. Have you tried editing the sky?
Another cool feature in Magic Editor is the ability to alter the sky in your landscape photo. Let’s say your family photo has a rather dull sky that dampens the mood. You would want to do something about it, right?
Head to the Magic Editor mode and check for the suggested edits on your landscape photo. It will show several options to change the pattern of clouds, create a sunset effect or go all artsy. Once you select a category, the Gen-AI will do its part to suggest changes that gel nicely with all the other elements. Choose your favourite and hit Save to apply the changes.
4. Feel free to zoom in
This tip applies to every editing tool, regardless of whether it has AI or not. While selecting your subjects with a lasso tool, you should always move the cursor precisely over its outline. Small elements like the edges of a sunglass, a hair clip, the space between hands, the tail of your furry dog, a missing palm of the person playing with the ball and lots of similar stuff can be missed if you don’t zoom in while making the selection.
You can spot the inaccuracies before you hit that ‘Save’ button, thereby saving yourself time and effort.
5. Make use of Portrait Light in dim-lit scenes
We all love well-lit selfies and portraits, regardless of whether there’s ample ambient lighting. It is this obsession with bright selfies that helped brands like Vivo and Oppo build a multi-million dollar business in the smartphone segment. With generative AI, you can now do that on any smartphone that can run Google Photos.
The AI algorithms can identify portrait photos and selfies in Google Photos and automatically recommend using portrait lighting. Tap on it and drag the circular source of the light to adjust the angle of artificial lighting. You can also adjust the intensity of the light using the bottom slider. Note that you need to apply the portrait effect from the edit menu before you can apply the Portrait Light.
6. Use Suggested edits
An often overlooked feature is the Suggested edits in Magic Editor. When you put a busy photograph in Magic Editor mode, Google Photos uses its AI to guess the subjects that you might want to delete.
For example, it will suggest removing a couple of people and pets from the background of your portrait photo. Tap on the accompanying ‘Erase All’ button and Magic Editor will remove most of them without leaving a trace. It saves you from the hard work of manually highlighting unwanted subjects.
7. Make minor tweaks while repositioning subjects
The Magic Editor lets you reposition your subjects in the photo but you should always make believable changes. For example, if you want to reposition your kid in your family photo, you can use Magic Editor to move the child according to your will and achieve the desired output. Avoid increasing its size or changing the angle unnaturally to maintain visual discipline.
Remember that the Magic Editor still can’t apply shadows and alter other minor details on your modified subject.
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(Hero and Featured Image Credits: Courtesy Le Buzz Studio via Unsplash / Representational Image)
