I've long been a fan of Google's Pixel lineup of phones for its photography prowess, but with the release of the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, it's clear that photographers are not necessarily the market for what is considered a solid lineup of phone cameras.
While that sounds like a weird thing to say about a camera that, by all accounts, is praiseworthy, take a look at the above detailed review from tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee. The part you'll want to jump into is just past four minutes in, where Brownlee takes a deep dive into what the Pixel's cameras are doing under the hood.
With just a few examples in both video and photo mode, it's clear that the Pixel's brains are always thinking about how to HDR the hell out of any scene it comes across, with a special affinity for doing so to faces. Colors seem to be pumped up, and while the camera generally uses all of this to good effect, it makes you ask whether this sort of software trickery is creating photos that are "real" or not.
But if that isn't enough to muddy the waters of the "what is a photo?" question, the myriad amounts of software editing options available after the fact will definitely cause confusion. One of the technologies that Brownlee demonstrates is the ability for the phone to analyze faces in group portraits and allow users to quickly replace heads that maybe don't have a good smile or have their eyes shut. If you're a photojournalist, this should be extra cause for alarm, since you're essentially creating a moment that didn't exist by using this. For everyone else, it's an easy way to do a head swap that might have taken me 15-20 minutes using Adobe Photoshop.
Speaking of Photoshop, Brownlee demonstrated a suite of AI-based editing tools that are now right on the phone, from smart object selection to object/background removal tools that look comparable to Adobe's Generative Fill tools. All on a phone.
This brings me back to the original quandary that photographers such as myself might have with this phone: while it's nice to be able to "fix" a photo after the fact, if that's really the main draw of the camera of the phone, what of just keeping things simple and taking good pictures with a decent lens and sensor? I felt like with my Pixel 6, the camera hardware itself wasn't an appreciable bump over the Pixel 3a XL I owned before, and in some ways, it feels like Google's cheating just a bit to wring some more out of the camera than what it's capable of on its own.
Video shooters, though, might appreciate the ability of the phone to single out different bits in the audio and adjust them accordingly. Can we get this feature in Adobe Premiere, please?
With the camera dropping for sale now, it won't be long before enough photographers get their hands on it for a visual artist's take on it.
Are you planning on upgrading to the Pixel 8 or Pixel 8 Pro? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
