“This is my favorite feature ever.”
It's rare for my wife to take a passing interest in my work. Our apartment is a revolving door for all kinds of gadgets, from bulky electric scooters and folding ebikes to augmented reality glasses and folding phones. Whenever I excitedly show her some unique piece of tech, she shrugs. That wasn't the case with one of the Pixel 8's features: Magic Editor.
Magic Editor is one of a few new powerful software tools Google debuted on its latest flagship smartphones, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. And these are indeed top-end phones now that Google has bumped up the price by $100 over their predecessors. At $699 and $999 respectively, they have bigger shoes to fill than their predecessors. Despite some quirks, they mostly deliver.
Magic Editor is a tool in Google Photos exclusive to the Pixel 8 series (at least, for now). Think of it as a simpler version of Photoshop that requires almost zero photo editing experience. I pulled up images of my dog and with just a tap, the software could isolate him from the background, allowing me to move him around the scene. I tried resizing him, making him gerbil-sized or scaling him up to the size of a dire wolf. The software magically replaces the texture around the subject to match the rest of the frame and spits out a few variations on the scene to choose from.