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NEW ⚡️MUST KNOW ⚡️Editing Features in Google Photos + Editing Tutorial (feat. Google Pixel 4a)
New Google Photos features (sky enchantement, de noise & sharpen) make editing photos from your Google Pixel 4a (or any other photo) as simple a few clics! I will do an editing breakdown of three pictures to show how to use these new features to edit your pictures.
🔗 More details https://blog.google/products/photos/new-helpful-editor/
✨ WATCH NEXT ✨
- Editing sunsets in Snapseed https://youtu.be/VxHsi19V2BA
- Simple editing tutorial https://youtu.be/CuU_Aq4aGGg
- Other new Pixel features https://youtu.be/m-ZZQoDHaoo
- Pixel 4a vs DSLR https://youtu.be/4KY9rIr0ifE
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:57 - First photo
04:06 - Second photo
05:52 - Third photo
07:06 - Conclusion
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Okay, so the other day when getting to my cottage, there was an insane sunset right back where we were passing by so I asked my sister to stop the car I ran outside with my Google Pixel for it to capture some pictures and when I got back I wanted to share them on my Instagram Stories. Before doing that, I wanted to quickly edit them so I opened up Google Photos and realized there's some pretty neat new editing features inside of the app. So this allowed me to edit this picture to look like this, this one to look like this, and this one to look like this. Let's see how did these edits and let's start by rolling the intro. For those of you who are new to this channel, I'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford, a young photographer and filmmaker on a journey to become better at this art. It's been a little while I didn't do editing tutorial so I'm pretty excited about doing this video. Let's jump right into the first picture! Okay, so now let's move right into the first picture tight here and if we look at this one it looks pretty good but there's not enough colors inside of the sky like I would want it and that's because I focused on the mountains here to make sure that we could see them and have them visible, but that means they reduced the amount of contrast on the whole picture which doesn't make the colors pop as much. But now there's a very easy way of fixing it. So if we come here and we go on edit we're going to see that we have new enhanced modes here. So we can click on « enhance » it's going to help a little bit but if we scroll further away we're going to see here we have new modes like « vivid », « luminous », « radiant », « amber », « airy », « afterglow » and « stormy » but if we come here I think the one that looks the best here is « radiant ». So with one click we already have a much better looking picture. So if we look at before we look at after, we're gonna see it's actually night and day in terms of editing. These new features are free for all Google Pixel users but they might require a Google One subscription for other people. I'm not exactly sure how it works but I'm gonna put the link down in the description about the terms of this. But now if you wanted to edit it a little bit more and have a little bit more of our look, not just a one-click edit, we can actually remove the effect. I'm not going to crop it or straighten it like I would normally do that at the beginning, but then if we come here on the adjust tab we have our normal options here. So we have brightness, contrast but a new one is here a sky. And I was a little bit scared when I heard they were gonna add options to edit the sky because I'm not a big fan of sky replacements but here they're actually not replacing the sky, they're only enhancing the colors and that is the normal edit I would do inside of Lightroom something like that but this is a one one-click edit. So if we come here we can have « vivid », « luminous », « radiant », « amber ». It's really between « amber » and « radiant » for me but I think « radiant » really works well here. Then we have a slider here so we can make the effect less visible, more visible. So i think if we go at the max it's too much, so something maybe around like 60 percent is actually looking pretty good. So if you look at before, after, it already looks much better. So if we click down here the next thing I'm going to do is just add a little bit more contrast so the mountains become a little bit darker because I want to really have more contrast on the sky and things like that. Now if you come on the next options here we're actually going to go on a white point, and just bring our whites up a little bit. Bring our highlights down a little bit more to add more color inside of the sky right here. Then we're just going to go on black point and bring it down a little bit more just to add even more black inside of the mountains. We're not going to touch the saturation, warmth, tint, skin tones or anything else but we're going to come at the end here and look at two new other options. So we now have a denoise option which is a much needed feature that was missing inside of Google Photos. So if we zoom inside of this image we might see there's a little bit noise inside of the trees here. We actually don't see it too much but if we just add a little bit noise reduction it's going to help. But then we can also have a new option which is sharpen. So we can even sharpen a little bit more the image right here. So now if we zoom back out and we look at this image we have before, we have after, and this is how easy it was to edit this image with the new editing options. So now we're going to save the copy and we're going to look at another image. So this is the second image I have right here that I took last night. It looks pretty good but I don't really like the look that it has which is way too much blue. So again if you go inside of the edit options, we're gonna see that's super easy to fix. So if we come here and we go on « amber » or « radiant », « radian » doesn't look that good but I think if we go on « amber » here we're gonna see it looks much better. So again one click and the image is pretty much fixed. But I want to customize it a little bit more so i'm gonna remove the « amber » option here then go and adjust. Go again on the sky tab, find « amber », bring it up maybe bring it a little bit more in this case. I actually want it to be a bit more intense. Then, we're going to click done, go in our other options again, bring down a little bit the highlights but bring up the white points, no maybe bring down the white points. I'm also just gonna go and the shadows here, and bring down the shadows a little bit more to make the sky pop a little bit more. And bring down the blacks really to add some a more contrast. Again I'm not gonna touch saturation, warmth, everything like that. One we could play with it a little bit here, if we wanted to to bring it even warmer, but i think that it looked pretty good at zero. Again we're going to come here in the last tab and just add a little bit of noise reduction because if we look at the trees here we can actually see that there's a little bit of noise inside of the trees. So we're just going to bring up some of the reduction, apply some sharpening just to bring it back to be nice and sharp. Zoom out and look at our before, after, before, after. You're gonna see it's a huge difference and then it is that took what, 20 seconds to do? Which is pretty incredible hat we have these capabilities built in inside of Google Photos on the Google Pixel phones! So the last picture we're going to look at is actually a very different one that we have here. So this is one that I took a few days ago when I was in Montreal at my school. But here we have a pretty dramatic sky. uh. So the first thing we're going to come here is actually just straighten it up a little bit more because it annoys me that it was so crooked. So we're just going to bring it up like that. Then if we go on our suggestion again, I think we'll go at the end here and click on « stormy » but here it's a bit too blue to my taste. So I'm going to remove « stormy », then go on « adjust », go on our sky option again, go on « stormy » and actually bringing it up a little bit more. Again this one click done. Then we're gonna go on contrast here and we're gonna bring up the contrast even more just to add even more drama inside of this scene. I might bring up the shadows a little bit just because it's a little bit too dark to my taste and now the last thing I want to do is just go inside of warmth because I think it's a little bit too blue, like it doesn't look natural in the end. So I'm just going to bring back some more inside of this picture and we're pretty much done with this edit. So again this is before, this is after, this is before, this is after. So this new sky option is really cool because it allows you to quickly apply effects on the sky and use AI to detect what is the sky what are the reflections and everything on the picture. And it's really simple to edit pictures and get much better pictures with just a few clicks in a few seconds. If you enjoyed this little editing tutorial, please let me know by hitting the like button below and also consider subscribing to the channel for more content on photographing filmmaking. See you in the next one! Bye, bye!
Video Links
- 🔗 More details
- Editing sunsets in Snapseed
- Simple editing tutorial
- Other new Pixel features
- Pixel 4a vs DSLR
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- TikTok
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
I recently captured some sunset photos on my Google Pixel 4a while driving back to my cottage, and when I got home to edit them for Instagram Stories, I discovered some really neat new editing features built right into Google Photos. I was excited enough to break down exactly how I used them, so here's a walkthrough of three different photos and the editing process for each.
The first photo had good composition—the mountains were visible and clear—but the sky lacked color and pop because I'd exposed for the landscape. This is where the new sky enhancement tools come in handy. Google Photos now offers preset styles like "radiant," "amber," "vivid," "luminous," "airy," "afterglow," and "stormy." I found that "radiant" transformed this image with a single click. From there, I fine-tuned it using the sky slider to dial in the intensity, then adjusted contrast, white point, and black point to make the mountains darker and the sky more dramatic. At the end, I used the new denoise feature to clean up some noise in the trees, and a quick sharpen pass to bring back detail.
The second image had too much blue cast, so I applied the "amber" preset and then customized it further—boosting the sky effect, bringing down highlights, adjusting shadows and blacks. Again, denoise and sharpen finished the edit in about 20 seconds total.
For the third photo, a dramatic overcast sky, I started by straightening the crop, then applied the "stormy" preset with the sky tool. I bumped up contrast for more drama, lifted the shadows slightly, and warmed it up because the raw file felt too cool and unnatural.
What impressed me most is how intelligent these tools are. The sky detection uses AI to know what's sky and what's reflection or foreground, so you're not doing crude replacements—just enhancing what's already there. These features are free for Google Pixel users, though they may require a Google One subscription for other phones. It's a solid reminder that you don't need expensive software to get professional-looking edits anymore.