In summary
- Google Photos ‘Touch Up’ feature discovered
- Lets you enhance specific facial features
- Sounds like next-level ‘Beautify’ effect
Google Photos is set for a major new editing feature that will let you tweak facial features on people, and it seems like the unwelcome evolution of a feature used by certain smartphone manufacturers.
Android Authority has managed to activate a new face retouching feature within the latest version of the Google Photos app and has put it through its paces.
This so-called ‘Touch Up’ feature will live in the Actions tab of Google Photos, and will use machine learning models to help you enhance facial features. There are distinct adjustable sliders for Smooth, Under Eyes, Irises, Teeth, Eyebrows, and Lips, allowing you to adjust the intensity of the effect.
It seems that the effects can be applied to individual faces in group photos, too, which is neat. It currently supports up to six distinct faces in a single photo.
Android Authority
Beautify evolved
All of this is very impressive. However, it gives me what younger people might refer to as ‘the ick factor’, of a strangely familiar variety.
Numerous phone manufacturers over the years have experimented with a so-called ‘Beautify’ effect in selfies. Some brands, particularly from China, still apply such an effect by default. Of my own recent phone reviews, the Nubia Z80 Ultra springs to mind in its implementation of this feature – and it’s not alone.
This Beautify effect smooths out facial features when you’re taking selfies. I’ve always found the results to be extremely fake-looking, often bordering on the ghoulish in the way that they smudge out all of the impurities and textures that make a human face look, well, human.
Google’s implementation of Touch Up appears to be the inevitable next-level AI-ification of this Beautify effect, and I’m most definitely not here for it. With that said, at least Google’s implementation will seemingly be completely optional and not shoved in your face as a default consideration, which has always been my biggest issue with such tools.
Of course, I’m well aware that this could be a simple cultural difference, and that potentially billions of phone users will now expect – perhaps even demand – the development of such a face-buffing feature.
As such, Google’s Touch Up (whenever it becomes active for regular users) will likely be yet another frivolous AI feature that I applaud from afar for its clever machine learning trickery – before duly discarding and never thinking about again.
Nubia Z80 Ultra
Author: Jon Mundy, Contributor, Tech Advisor
Jon is a freelance journalist who got his start covering mobile games at the dawn of the App Store. He has since covered everything from smart home tech and laptops to food and culture, but always seems to return to his fascination with smartphones.
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