Last week Google launched the Zoom Enhance feature, but only on the Pixel 8 Pro – sorry, Pixel 8 users. The new Pixel 9 series will have it out of the box, of course, even the vanilla model. However, these are still a couple of days away from shipping. Here’s an early preview of what this feature does, courtesy of Peyman Milanfar, who works at Google on computational imaging, machine learning and vision related tasks.
First, what is Zoom Enhance? Unlike Super Res Zoom, this feature works even after you’ve taken the photo. If you have a Pixel 8 Pro (or are reading this after you received your Pixel 9), you will find Zoom Enhance in Google Photos under Tools.
Milanfar posted a thread on X to give details on how the feature works. The most interesting part is that this is Google’s first image-to-image diffusion model that is designed to run on-device (so, the Pixel 8 with its 8GB of RAM can’t handle it).
As we mentioned above, this works on photos you have already shot – any photos, old ones included, even ones you took with a non-Pixel camera. Apparently, this even works for images that aren’t actual photos too, you can upscale images you get from text-to-image AI models.
Here are some sample photos shared by Milanfar. They are organized in groups of threes: first, the original photo, next a simple crop and upscale and, finally, an upscale processed by Zoom Enhance.
Example of Zoom Enhance
Going past the maximum zoom of the Pixel 8 Pro
More Zoom Enhance images
Enhancing Mona Lisa
Trying Zoom Enhance on text
Improving the framing of a photo by cropping in
That car looks very far away
Another example of improving the framing
This one is a 20 year old photo
One more Zoom Enhance example
Google initially announced Zoom Enhance back in October 2023, a week before the Pixel 8 series went on sale. You can say that it took the Google team quite a while to finish working on this feature. At least Google was always clear that this will be only for the Pixel 8 Pro and not the vanilla model.
