Google has wrapped up its Morning with Google+ event, and the Internet is abuzz with news and reviews surrounding the announcements. Amongst several other features, Google’s social network is getting a slew of new photo and video enhancement features, that intend on not just making the sharing experience better, but put Google in a position where the Mountain View company can compete directly with dedicated filter and photo-enhancement apps that are available for Android and iOS. Let’s take a look at what they announced for Google+ today.
The first and most interesting is the Auto Awesome Movies, which is basically a feature inspired from HTC’s video highlights that we’ve seen recently on HTC One and the Sense 5 updates on older devices like HTC One X. Auto Awesome Movies takes video snippets from uploaded content, merges it with your shared photos, and adds background music to it, making the whole experience more catchy. To make matters even more interesting, akin to HTC’s offering, photos and video clippings are rendered with filters applied automatically, giving the whole feature a very cool look and feel.
Next up, we got to see a better control over automatic photo enhancements, where you can control the level of enhancement that the software applies to your sharing. Essentially, the enhancements can be dialed up or down, so that you don’t end up with something that looks completely the opposite of what you wanted it to be. Another is Snapseed getting an HDR scape filter, while Google’s “computer vision” can now recognize more objects by default. Finally, tallying up the score is motion shots for Google+’s Auto Awesome Photos, which replicate the same subject several times within a shot, and eraser, which automatically removes moving objects from images.
Auto Awesome Action
Auto Awesome Eraser
For Google’s Nik offering of professional filters, Analog Efex Pro was also added to the offering. Furthermore, which is a feature which I’ve been personally looking forward to for a good while is auto background backup, which saves your photos at full-res in the background, and this feature is finally coming to Google+ for iOS.
Overall, Google seems to have put a lot of thought and effort behind making Google+ more than just a social sharing platform. The photo and video enhancements appear to compete directly with Facebook Camera app for the iPhone, alongside giving potential competition to the likes of Instagram with the effects and filters offering. Some of Google+’s new offerings, like motion shots, are hardly found anywhere else, so that’s an added advantage.
The updates to Google+ app with enhanced features for Android are expected to start rolling out today, so keep an eye out.
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