Over the last several months, Google Photos has added more advanced features for editing tools for images and video. Now, the service appears to be rolling out even more tools that allow users to manipulate images to their liking.

XDA user Wrx95Pro sent us a tip revealing Google Photos silently added new tools to sharpen images and reduce noise. When you tap Edit on a picture and go to Adjust, navigating to the end of the carousel now displays options for “Sharpen” and “Denoise.” The sharpen tool will make images appear, well, sharper. The denoise tool will cut down on grain that sometimes accompanies images in low-light situations.

Both new options feature increments ranging from 0 to 100, giving users a lot of control over how much of a specific feature is applied. With something like sharpening, you typically don’t want to apply too much, otherwise, your images will quickly look artificial. Of course, art is subjective, so if you like more sharpening, by all means have at it.

With modern smartphone cameras, software already applies a great deal of sharpening and denoising (among other adjustments), so you probably don’t want to mess with these features too much. But they’re certainly nice options to have. These new editing tools appear to be part of a server-side update, so you should see them over the next few days. For what it’s worth, we saw the new options already live on one of our devices.

It’s unclear if the latest tools will be placed behind a paywall once they’re fully rolled out. Google Photos has been slowly improving the editing tools that are available in the service, but some of them are only accessible if you have a Google One subscription. For now, the options for sharpening and denoising images appear to be free, but we'll keep an eye out if that changes.

Google Photos Developer: Google LLC
Price: Free
4.5
Download