I have started to explore the camera and photo editing capabilities of the Pixel 10 Pro, which I took delivery of a few days ago. I have been a long-time Apple fan, so this is a return to an ecosystem that I’ve not tried in (my Amazon purchase history reliably informs me) more than 12 years – but that’s another story.
On the whole I’ve been very impressed with the camera. However, taking a rather drab picture and then trying to breathe some life into it has proved an informative exercise.
Ignore the leaves in the top right, which are knocking my eye out even now. The auto-erase feature works quite well, although there is a bit of a UI car crash if you are trying to draw around something that abuts the side of the frame. Let’s ignore that for now and focus on a couple of other details.
The first is some unusual artefacting on the edges of the window frame:
Although there is what looks like the signs of compression, there is a pattern around a lot of these high contrast boundaries. It reminds me of some of the weirdness I used to see with HDR software: the reassembly of the bracketed exposures sometimes went awry, and edges had strange shadows and overlays. My working assumption is this is a burst of images that are then assembled into a single shot – and not entirely successfully in high contrast areas.
What really piqued my interest was what happened when I tried the auto-framing feature:
Even though I didn’t select the widest lens, the camera took a picture with it at the same time. The framing is quite pleasing, from a basic geometric perspective. However, it has introduced a few unwanted elements into an already anaemic picture.
First is the lifeless building on the left; second is the tomb-stoning. Last, is the plain weird artefacts in the foliage:
Having looked at the picture on a monitor, there are bands of distortion in the centre left and right of the image. I have no idea what’s going on here: there is clearly some sort of wrinkle in what, at least at fact value, appears to be a non-generative feature of the software.