Google Camera: All the features that you get on Google Pixel smartphones

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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

• What is Google Camera?
• Google Camera v9.0 vs. v9.1
• Google Camera v9.1 on Pixel 8 series
• Google Camera: Features
• HDR Plus
• Night Sight
• Astrophotography
• Zero Shutter Lag (ZSL)
• About The Author

Google Pixel smartphones have long been some of the best Android smartphones you can buy, but their presence at the top is surprising if you take a deeper look at the spec sheet. The Pixels barely have top-of-the-line specifications, trailing behind most market leaders. However, thanks to some nifty software magic, Google can extract the most possible value out of hardware. We can see this in action with the Google Camera app on Pixel smartphones, which enables some cool photography features. It is easily one of the best Android camera apps out there. Here are all the features that you get on the Google Camera app.

What is Google Camera?

Google Camera is the default camera application shipped on Google Pixel smartphones. Most OEMs ship their own modified camera app as part of their Android skin, so Google is no different.

What makes Google Camera unique is that it can extract the best results out of dated camera hardware often found on Pixel smartphones. The Google Camera app contains most of the algorithms responsible for Google’s software magic on photos.

These software optimizations are so potent that third-party modders regularly attempt to port the latest Google Camera app from Pixel devices to other Android smartphones, improving the photography prowess of their non-Pixel hardware.

The Google Camera app was initially released to the public on the Google Play Store. But those days are long gone. Google Camera is now exclusive to Pixel smartphones. If you spot the app on a non-Pixel smartphone, it will likely be a third-party Google Camera port (often called “GCam” in this context).

Google Camera v9.0 vs. v9.1

Google recently updated its UI for the first time since the Pixel 4. The new Google Camera UI is available on version 9.0 and above. Notably, this version of the app requires Android 14. So if your Pixel isn’t eligible for the Android 14 update, you won’t be able to use Google Camera v9.0.

The biggest change in the new update is that you now have a toggle to switch between photo and video modes. When you select a mode, you will now see options for either photo or video. Below are the options listed for both modes in the new Google Camera app.

Photo: Action Pan, Long Exposure, Portrait, Photo (main), Night Sight, Panorama, Photo Sphere (missing on Pixel 8 Pro)
Video: Pan, Video (main), Slow motion, Time Lapse, Blur

Note that the Photo Sphere mode has been removed from the Pixel 8 series.

Elsewhere, the new Google Camera app shifts both photo and video settings overlay to the middle of the app screen. These can be accessed from the settings button in the bottom left corner of the app.

Google Camera v9.1 on Pixel 8 series

The Pixel 8 series gets all of these changes and then some. The new Google flagships ship with Google Camera v9.1, which pushes the photo and video settings to the bottom of the app screen. Unfortunately, Google has removed the brightness, shadow, and color temperature sliders from the main Pixel camera UI in this version of the app. You’ll now have to manually select these sliders from a new slider menu on the bottom right of the app screen.

The Pixel 8 Pro also exclusively features a new Pro mode, a first for the Pixel phone lineup. It lets you quickly change the resolution of photos, capture in RAW, and manually select the lens (Wide, Ultrawide, or Telephoto) you want to use.

Google Camera: Features

Google Camera has many features for photos and videos, with the former overpowering the latter. Below, we explain all the Google Camera features you get on Pixel phones.

HDR Plus

The highlight feature of the Google Camera app is HDR Plus, which was added around the release of the Nexus 6. HDR Plus is the engine behind HDR imaging in the Google Camera app. In its early announcement posts in 2014, the company said it uses “computational photography” for HDR Plus.

When you press the shutter button in the Google Camera app, HDR Plus captures a rapid burst of three to 15 pictures and combines them into one.

In low light scenes, HDR Plus takes a burst of shots with short exposure times, aligns them algorithmically, and then claims to replace each pixel with the average color at the position across these burst shots. Using short exposures reduces blur, while averaging shots reduces noise.

In scenes with high dynamic range, HDR Plus follows the same technique, and it manages to avoid blowing out the highlights and combines enough shots to reduce noise in the shadows.

In scenes with high dynamic range, the shadows can often remain noisy as all images captured in a burst remain underexposed. This is where the Google Camera app uses exposure bracketing, making use of two different exposures and combining them.

HDR Plus with Bracketing is the highlight feature of the Google Camera app.

The experience with exposure bracketing gets complicated with Zero Shutter Lag (ZSL, more on this feature below). HDR Plus works around ZSL by capturing frames before and after the shutter press. One of the shorter exposure frames is used as the reference frame to avoid clipped highlights and motion blur. Other frames are aligned to this frame, merged, and then de-ghosted through a spatial merge algorithm that decides per pixel whether image content should be merged or not.

If all of this sounds complicated and confusing to you as a user, fret not. The Google Camera app doesn’t require you to worry about these details. You just have to click photos; Google’s algorithms will handle the rest.

Here are some camera samples from the Pixel 8 Pro’s primary camera:

Night Sight

Night Sight is all of HDR Plus but in very low light. Because of the lack of light, the exposures and burst limits are allowed to be liberally longer. The time to take a night shot is thus longer, and a stronger element of motion must be compensated for.

You can expect a Night Sight photo to take about one to three seconds, and we’d advise you to wait another second after pressing the shutter button. Pixel smartphones will automatically enable Night Sight when it is dark, though you can manually toggle the mode if necessary. Note that Night Sight does not work if you have Flash turned on.

On newer Pixel smartphones, the denoising process in the HDR Plus process during Night Sight uses new neural networks that run on the Tensor processor. This has improved the speed of a Night Sight shot.

Here are some Night Sight samples from the Pixel 8 Pro:

On the new Pixel 8 series, you can now record longer timelapse videos in low light. You will need to set your phone steady, preferably on a tripod, and set the Night Sight setting under the Timelapse mode to Auto. You will then be able to shoot a long timelapse video that will have the bonus processing of Night Sight, giving you much more quality than you would have otherwise received with just the regular Timelapse mode.

Astrophotography

Astrophotography on Google Camera takes the principles behind long exposure HDR Plus and runs with it beyond Night Sight.

You need to mount your Pixel smartphone on a tripod and be in practically pitch-black conditions (away from city lights) with your phone pointed toward the clear sky. Once your Pixel phone determines the conditions to be right, it will show a message “Astrophotography on.”

In this mode, the Pixel phone will take 16 16-second photos and merge them to produce one detailed photograph. You can also create a cool one-second astrophotography timelapse of this 16-second shot.

Below is an example of an Astrophotography shot taken from the Pixel 7 Pro

Zero Shutter Lag (ZSL)

About The Author