Google announced Color Pop (sic) earlier this year at Google IO and although some of us have seen it appear randomly in their Google Photos it has not been a constant occurrence. Now Google appear to be testing it’s manual application on more users’ devices as well as the ability to apply bokeh effects manually.
A user over at Google+ has posted on the Google Pixel Phones community that they noticed they they now had the ability to manually apply Color Pop on images taken with their phone. Along with Color Pop they could also adjust the depth blur effect of the image — and it was NOT taken with the depth setting turned on within the camera app.
The Color Pop filter allows the user to turn the background into greyscale while keeping the foreground coloured. We have seen it appear as an auto-awesome image by Google Photos but have so far not been fortunate enough to receive the ability to perform it manually. Manual bokeh is similar in its action but instead of making the background greyscale it blurs it.
Google use a lot of this sort of machine learning in their bokeh effect with a single lens camera and thus it is not much of a stretch to see them extend the ability to perform this manually to Google Photos. Although it seems that the effect is not perfected yet you would expect Google would want to bring this as a new feature to their new Pixel phones set to be announced in New York in a few weeks.
Of course, if it does arrive as a Pixel 3 exclusive feature at first it surely won’t be long before Google roll it out to all devices so everyone can enjoy it. How many here actually take the time to apply any of these manual filters that Google include in their software?
