Pixel glitches in the shadows. Rainbow colors in the trees. Happily, Google software updates have fixed two problems, and I think you’ll benefit from what I’ve learned.
As a photographer, I wanted to love the Pixel 8 Pro’s new high-end camera technology. But some issues started my relationship with Google’s flagship smartphone on the wrong foot.
Two software updates have already made big improvements. The phone’s camera hardware foundation is strong, too. But if you’re spending $1,000 or more on the Pixel 8 Pro, especially if you’re keen on its photographic abilities, I think you’ll benefit from what I’ve learned.
I spent hours pixel peeping at test photos, talking with Google camera designers and swapping files with my colleague Andrew Lanxon, who wrote our Pixel 8 Pro review and who, by the way, happens to be a pro photographer.
In short, I believe Google’s new phone is generally a step up, with better light-gathering ability than last year’s Pixel 7 Pro and often more detail than Apple offers in its iPhones. When the light is good, it’ll capture a lot of detail that’s great for landscape and architecture photos.
The trouble spots crop up with close inspection of shadowed areas and jumbled tree branches. And when shooting top-quality photos, the high-resolution sensors bring slow shooting performance. At least for now, you have to be judicious about how you use the phone if you want to go beyond 12-megapixel JPEGs.
Here’s my assessment of the trouble spots, advice on how to sidestep them and the likelihood that Google will patch them up.
Google has done a remarkable job squeezing more image quality than I’d have thought possible out of tiny smartphone cameras. One of Google’s biggest computational photography skills has been coping with the bad dynamic range of smartphone image sensors: They struggle to capture both shadow detail and bright highlights.
With its HDR Plus technology, Google pioneered an approach that marries several underexposed frames into one final photo. That helps reveal what’s happening in the shadows while keeping bright skies from washing out into a white sheet.
But with the Pixel 8 Pro, I found shadow areas sometimes suffered from a unnatural, blotchy noise patterns when I was shooting high-contrast scenes with bright and dark areas. And in dim conditions, the phone sometimes erased textural detail altogether. Testing lab DXOMark also dinged the Pixel 8 Pro for wiping out details and textures at times, though overall rating the phones cameras very highly.
Shooting with Night Sight mode and in low-resolution modes can help, and the problem isn’t as likely to bother you as it would if you’re not zooming in, cropping or boosting exposure when you’re editing.
In high contrast photos, like this cropped shot, shadow areas can show unnatural splashes of noise pixels. The lower photo is overexposed to spotlight the problem; you won’t notice this problem much unless you brighten deeper shadows. A more even pattern of noise looks more natural and is more amenable to treatment with noise reduction software.
And some good news from my earlier tests: Google fixed a different problem that cropped up in high-contrast scenes, where the phone’s image processing could misjudge the placement of patches of pixels and obliterate details. For me, that was an issue that appeared with the phone’s new high-resolution sensors — 50 megapixels on the main wide-angle camera and 48 megapixels on the ultrawide and 5x telephoto cameras.
One hardware option that could help is a new feature in the main camera’s sensor called dual conversion gain, which Google touts under the label Dual Exposure. Google uses it to boost video dynamic range since it helps capture more shadow detail, and that could be done with photos too.
