Google Plus Can Your Videos Look Much Better

During last two years, Google has been enhancing the photos you upload to Google Plus and from now it has started to do the same with videos too. Whenever Google thinks it should improve a video you upload, a banner will appear in the Google+ web app that asks you if you want to preview the potential changes. You can also opt to apply these automatic enhancements to any other video you upload to Google Plus Photos (either directly or through Auto Backup) on a case-by-case basis.

As Google engineer Tim St. Clair written , the new Google Plus feature will be able to automatically enhance lighting, color and stability. Coming soon, it’ll also enhance speech in videos. The new feature is now available in Google Plus on Mac, Windows and ChromeOS (you can find it behind the ‘More’ menu, as well as in the Google+ Photos app.

Google automatically renders a low-res side-by-side preview of your improved and unimproved videos once you opt to give it a try. At a rather blurry 240p (see above), that’s not necessarily the best way to preview these changes, but given that these enhancements take a bit of compute power, it’s likely the only way to show them to you in a reasonable time.

Reasonable people can argue about the success of Google Plus as a social network, but there can be little doubt that Google Plus Photos have always been one of the most interesting and innovative aspects of the service. As more and more people now also take videos with their smartphones, it makes sense for Google to bring some of the technologies it has developed for photos (and YouTube) to these private videos as well.

Google has long offered a similar feature for YouTube users, so there is likely some overlap between the two systems here. While YouTube offers the option to “auto-fix” videos, though, it doesn’t automatically prompt its users to do this for them. YouTube also offers a number of manual tools for changing contrast, saturation and color temperature that Google Plus doesn't currently offer. Google’s announcement comes only a few days after Facebook announced that it also started auto-enhancing images that its users upload to its servers. That face that Google announced this new feature is likely a coincidence, but it’s an interesting one.