Skógafoss It's a must see, everyone said, and in a country with as much natural beauty as Iceland, that means it's going to be shit majestic. The waterfall did not disappoint, but even on a cold weekday in March, the place was packed. My photos… and come on, you have to take pictures, they were full of tourists in puffer coats, all taking their own pictures of the falls. Not exactly what you print and hang on the wall.
A couple of months later, I saw a photo of the same waterfall appears on the screen at Google's annual developer conference when the company demonstrated its new ai-powered Magic Editor. In this version, a tourist in a puffer coat stood in front of the falls on a gray day. CEO Sundar Pichai talks about on-screen editing. The sky turns blue, the woman changes position, her suit is touched up. Pichai comments on using the tool to “get rid of some clouds” and brighten the scene to make it look “as sunny as you remember.”
The thing about photos is that they are unforgiving.
Phone makers have been emphasizing blue skies and smooth skin for years, but the latest batch of Pixels, Galaxies and iPhones are using ai to take photo manipulation further than ever. Magic Editor on Pixel 9 includes a new option called “reimagine.” Now, instead of simply deleting or moving objects, you can add things with nothing more than a text message. Replace background; sprinkle some rainbows and butterflies. It is in the service of creating the scene that you rememberIt doesn't represent the scene exactly as you saw it, or so Pixel camera premier Isaac Reynolds said. cabling earlier this year. They are memories, not photos.
The thing about photos is that they are unforgiving. Photos tend to show us things we would otherwise ignore: things we have learned to ignore in person appear in images as obvious distractions. In one of my favorite photos of my son from last year, he is sitting on our living room couch wearing a firefighter hat, laughing hard at something with pure joy on his face.
But there's the problem of our couch, which is literally falling apart after enduring years of cat claws. My brain tuned out the frayed upholstery a long time ago, but when I look at that photo, my eye immediately fixates on the imperfections. Being able to eliminate distractions and keep your attention on your subject is pretty appealing, even for a photography purist like me. But at that point, can you really call it a photo?
when the photos are vibes, Then you can add whatever you want to them.
It all gets incredibly complicated the more you try to pin down the definition of a photo. But as an exercise, I decided to put the tools to the test and force myself into this mindset of capturing memories and not photographs. Would I like the images I came up with? Would I feel comfortable even calling them photos? I took a Pixel 9 Pro on some family adventures over a weekend, photographed even more than I normally would as a family photographer, and then spent some time editing them in Google Photos using these ai tools. And for fun, I edited some old photos to see if the ai could, in fact, bring my photos closer to my memories.
when the photos are vibes and no longer photos, so you can add whatever you want to them, as long as it serves as a memory. Maybe I don't have much of an imagination, or maybe the “reimagine” tool is just a bridge too far for this exercise, but I struggled to find use cases for it. I added a flock of birds to the sky in a photo of my son running through a field. Seems plausible and nice, I guess. But if it's a good photo, it's probably because the light was really nice and my son has a big smile on his face, not because of the ai birds.
I switched gears and focused on using the less nihilistic tools in the Google Photos ai toolbox. During the “taking pictures, that is, memories” part of the exercise, I made an effort to take pictures that I would normally skip: a stranger in the frame or a lot of clutter in the background. And you know what? ai is really good at fixing those things.
Within the framework of recording “memories”, I took things from my images that did not help me remember the scene. At first it was hard to even see some of these things when looking at my photos; They looked the way they looked because that's what was there. But what about the black strap of a diaper bag that my husband carries on his shoulder? I guess I don't remember it specifically because it's something one of us always carries with us on our outings. With a few taps, it disappears from the image and you would never know the difference.
And while removing an entire crowd of people from my waterfall scene didn't improve my photo recall, I found Magic Editor much more useful for removing one or two people from a frame. Three-year-olds are restless little people who typically don't cooperate if you're waiting for the perfect moment to take a photo; that includes waiting for someone to come out of the background of my shot. Magic Editor has convinced me that I can take those photos anyway and just delete the people after the fact.
You can't edit a bad photo to turn it into a good photo.
It's also possible to take cleanliness too far. I removed a trash can from the background of a photo of my son on a playground. But why stop there? I used to reimagine to take out a building that housed some bathrooms and replace it with trees. The resulting photo is completely convincing and, of course, public toilets are not a central part of my memory of that day. But the photo is also more generic, more boring. We could be at any playground in the greater Seattle area or maybe the country. I returned the building.
That has been my overwhelming impression throughout this experiment. There are a lot of things I don't mind taking out of a photo, like the crusty snot under my son's nose or the mouse droppings littering the sidewalk where he's standing. But it's very easy to cross a line and take so much away from an image that you actually eliminate the context and imperfections that gave it character.
This exercise has also confirmed my belief that you cannot edit a bad photograph into a good photograph. Believe me, I've spent hours trying over the years. But this is true for traditional photo editing and for fancy ai tools; Good lighting and thoughtful composition will do much more for a photo than any touch-up in Photoshop.
That photo I took of Skógafoss, the one I tried to clean up with ai, is actually my least favorite photo from that day. After taking that “here's the famous” photo, I walked around trying to find different angles and interesting details to point my camera at. A pair of birds nestled on a moss-covered rock, a woman in a red coat and pants posing for her camera with a selfie stick, a view of the blue sky taken through the fog from near the base of the falls: These are the photos I like the most from that day. They are the images that best capture the memory of what it feels like to be there.
Do I think there is a place for ai photo editing tools? Safely. Frankly, I'm impressed by how much better the Magic Eraser is in the age of ai, and I think I'll actually take more photos that I would otherwise throw away knowing I can eliminate an obvious distraction later. But ai doesn't change the fundamentals of good photography, at least for me. There is still no substitute for being there, good lighting, or capturing the right expression on your subject's face. After all, what is a memory if not imperfect?
Photography by Allison Johnson/The Verge
