Sponsored by HONOR
Most of us like to edit our smartphone pictures to a greater or lesser degree – if it’s ever felt like a chore, discover how the AI editing tools in HONOR phones make editing so much easier and more fun.
Sponsored. In our recent coverage of the latest HONOR phones – the great-value and robust HONOR Magic8 Lite and the flagship Magic8 Pro – we’ve been mainly focussing on the exceptional camera performance (particularly the night telephoto prowess of the Magic8 Pro).
Both phones also include lots of features to help you edit your pictures so they look their best – features which will save keen smartphone photographers a lot of time and reduce the need to use third-party apps or editing software.
After all, once we have taken a really good smartphone picture, most of us want to share it with the world as quickly as possible.
Introducing the editing features on HONOR phones
To access the suite of picture editing tools, simply open a photo within the Honor camera ‘Gallery’ and select ‘AI Edit.’ Note these editing tools are specific to HONOR devices, so you won’t see them if you open a photo from within Google Photos, for instance.
AI Eraser
However careful you are at the time of shooting, there are times when you can’t avoid distractions creeping into your image. This is particularly so if you use your phone for travel and street photography – it’s not like we are Hollywood movie directors who can totally control the scene and how people behave!
So the AI Eraser tool comes in really handy for removing distractions, be they cars, rubbish bins and those plastic chairs that seem to be everywhere these days.
Now, before you worry that this is somehow ‘cheating’ with your photography, removing simple distractions is allowed in many photography competitions and photography club distinctions, so it’s not a new thing. The term often used by camera clubs is ‘gardening.’
Removing passers by or stray people is a common photo-editing job and it really couldn’t be easier. Below is a nice picture of a winter sunset, but we could do without the people on the bridge.
So, with the AI Eraser tool selected, we choose ‘Erase passers by’ and bingo they are gone. AI has done a great job of removing them without changing the actual image. When you consider how long this would take in most photo-editing apps or programs, it is a no-brainer.
There are also ‘preset’ tools for removing reflections, wrinkles in clothes and even moire patterns (an annoying phenomenon when patterned, detailed, or grid-like objects interact and intersect).
But what about removing smaller objects and distractions that don’t fall into these broader categories? Again, this is no problem with AI Eraser – you can ‘Circle to erase’ larger objects, or ‘Brush to erase’ smaller ones.
Here, for example we used Circle to erase to get rid of the first car. Tip: zoom into the image to make this job easier, or crop the image first.
Meanwhile, in this image of a Great Tit, we used Brush to Erase to tidy up some foliage in the foreground. You might need a few tries with more complex objects, but it’s still a very quick job. For more tips, see the HONOR website.
AI Upscale
The next really useful AI-powered editing tool we’re going to talk about is AI Upscale. It’s an easy, one-click way to boost the resolution, clarity and colour of an image, and again takes seconds.
We found it a good way of sharpening far-away objects, taken using the telephoto camera with digital zoom activated. It is also a useful way to reduce any noise that creeps in when shooting in low light or at night (something that can’t always be avoided).
And you don’t need to just take our word for it. Find out how AI Upscale was used to enhance some classic old photos of Manchester United here.
AI Cutout
If AI Upscale works quickly, AI Cutout works even faster. It soon recognised our cute robin, and cut it out – giving us the options to either place on a transparent background, a solid colour background, or even add to another image altogether.
You don’t need to worry about fiddly, manual selection tools, so this is a good way to add interesting elements from your pictures to cards, flyers, etc. Or just have fun!
AI Outpainting
The AI editing features on HONOR phones can also really help when you want to change the composition or aspect ratio of an image taken with your phone. So you can expand the space around your subject if you decide that the original composition was a bit ‘tight’ or change the aspect ratio. Below, we have changed the aspect ratio to the popular square (1:1) aspect ratio.
This is often a better solution than cropping the image to change aspect ratio, as you are not making the image ‘smaller’ or lowering its resolution.
AI Outpainting can intelligently fill in missing buildings and backgrounds or also tilt the picture for creative effect, so it’s a really handy tool that saves significant editing time.
Other essential editing tools
There are also tools for cropping your image or adjusting brightness, contrast, highlights and shadows and other key aspects of exposure, along with another powerful, AI-driven feature, AI Colour.
We will be looking at this in more detail in a later tutorial, but it’s a great way to adjust the colours in your image and get more of a ‘cinematic’ look.
To get started, you can choose from a range of presets – Magic Colour 1, Romantic Blue, Golden Autumn or Warm Sunset – along with a wide range of filters, that include ‘bright,’ ‘black and white’ and so on.
It’s also easy to intelligently extract the ‘colour style’ of another photo and add to to the image you are editing (simply click on the dropper icon). Here, for example, we added the muted towns of a cloudy day from another photo to make our Glastonbury dragon look more atmospheric.
For more on Magic Colour, see HONOR’s in-depth guide here.
Keep coming back for more guides to HONOR phones and see the official website for the latest deals!
