Pixel 11 Pro review: Google AI as your enabler

The bulk of Google's updates this year are around photography and mostly in the software. As far as the hardware changes, the Pixel 11 Pro's 50-megapixel main sensor is a bit bigger than before, while the telephoto camera is also slightly tweaked with a larger half-inch sensor. The front camera is the same 42MP system as on the previous model.

The main updates on the software side are Magic Capture, Instant Night Sight, Camera Looks, Creator Suite, Pro Stable Video and the expansion of Pro Zoom to 120x (up from 100x before).

I'll dig into each of these, but before I get into the nitty gritty of the new features, I'll just point out that, in my experience, Google still has a superior Portrait mode to Apple. It's easier to use and works in a much wider range of scenarios, whereas on iPhones you're still required to be a certain distance away and wait for the camera to decide when it's ready to capture a portrait with a blurred background.

Camera Looks

That said, Apple might have the upper hand when it comes to built-in filters. Camera Looks is ostensibly Google's answer to the Photographic Styles that were introduced on the iPhone 13 series. Apple did update these styles when it launched the iPhone 16 models, which made them more elegant and pretty.

The Pixel 11 Pro's Camera Looks feel like the initial version Apple rolled out. There are four looks that are more permanent: Original, Natural, Shadows and Vanilla. Pick one of these and your preference will remain active the next time you open the camera. From the Looks picker, you can swipe through a carousel of six additional filters. These will remain active for that shooting session and revert to your default look after. The options here are: Default, Editorial, Velvet, Classic, Digi, Black Tie and Minimal.

The difference across the entire lineup, permanent or not, is not huge. You can customize each look to your preference, but because Google is likely not using depth information the way Apple is, the filters feel surface-level. When you swipe between, say, Luminous or Ethereal on iPhones, you'll see a fairly drastic change in background colors, skin tone, overall hues as well as highlight and contrast levels.

I don't want to dwell too long on a feature that's something you'll likely play with once and forget about after landing on a favorite vibe. But I do think this is one area of photography where Google lags behind Apple, and that's worth noting since that's somewhat rare.

Instant Night Sight

Google consistently outperforms the smartphone competition on nighttime photography and instead of resting on its laurels this year, it upped the ante. With its Tensor G6 CPU and some other tweaks, the company was able to greatly shorten the amount of time needed to capture shots in low light. Part of the solution was due to the larger sensors, allowing the phone to get shots with more light and thus requiring fewer frames to get more data. Exposure times were reduced as a result.

In practice, I did find Night Sight to be a lot faster than the iPhone 17 Pro Max. I used both phones to take pictures in a pitch black room and the Pixel was consistently quicker to finish capturing the shot. When there was a little bit more light, the Pixel finished getting the shot before I even counted to two. I know what phone I'm taking with me the next time I go on a night hike.

120x Pro Zoom is a bit too much

The AI generative fill on Google's 120x Pro Zoom feature is, to put it gently, a bit much. I can see the appeal of getting up close to extremely faraway objects, but I find the actually applicable scenarios to be few and far between. I frequently photograph wildlife from a distance, so I'm excited about greater zoom options. But when I tried to take a shot of a heron perched on a branch on the Delaware river, I actually found 120x zoom to be too much. The previous 100x zoom brought me close enough, and the additional distance gained actually forced me into an awkward crop.

That wasn't a big issue though. My main problem with 120x Pro Zoom was in how uncanny the results were. Cleaned up lines on buildings and inanimate objects is fine, but the picture my Pixel 11 Pro delivered of the heron up close gave me chills. And not in a good way. Its feathers felt too neat, almost like Gemini combed it out for a photoshoot, and its facial features just felt uncanny, as if the bird was casually smiling at me while plotting my death.

My overthinking aside, even my friends immediately shouted "That's AI" when they saw the photo. And the metadata would prove them somewhat right, since it was indeed filled in with AI. If Google's intention with 120x Pro Zoom is to help you get clearer shots from far away, then sure, the overly clean and perfect images deliver. But is this something I would use regularly? I'm not sure.

The whole point of taking pictures is almost lost to AI these days. We use photos to capture lovely memories or prove we were at a place or event. Neither of these purposes is enhanced by the presence of AI edits. No one is going to look at that photo of a heron and think, "Wow, Cherlynn got really close to that bird and it looks nice." They might instead assume, "Wow, Cherlynn ran this dodgy picture through AI, and all the uncanny realism is a bit too distracting. Is the bird even real?"

We can keep judging why people (myself included) take photos, but for now I'll just say that the practical challenges of shooting at that zoom level are ultimately in the way of utility. I had to struggle to steady the phone so it could frame up a shot, and the viewfinder kept locking onto other parts of the scene as it attempted to help keep what it thought was my subject in view. I actually had to fight it to get the bird back in sight.

Had the very still, stately heron been a skittish deer or a speedy dancer at a concert, I would have lost the shot and worse, missed living in the moment as I fought the phone.

My conundrum here is that none of the photos I took on my iPhone 17 Pro Max were much better by comparison. Google continues to prove it is technically superior at computational photography, but maybe we don't need to keep pushing this particular envelope.

I guess the relative good news here is that when I used 120x Pro Zoom for stationary objects like details on a gigantic art installation from a distance, the results weren't quite as eerie and seemed clean.

Magic Capture

Funnily enough, Google introduced a new feature that is supposed to help you stay in the moment. Instead of carefully framing up a shot and waiting for a picture perfect moment to happen, Magic Capture allows you to hold up your phone and just point it at whatever is happening. It'll basically capture a video while you do that, then pick out some highlights it thinks are worth saving.

You can record for up to two minutes, after which time the Pixel will just stop recording. Later, depending on how much good stuff it believes there was, it'll just save a few still images to your photo gallery. The good news is it will also store a video version of the clip, so you're not completely dependent on the AI to make the decisions. And as with all videos in the Photos app, you can export any frame within as a picture.

In my testing, Magic Capture was good at pulling out obvious moments from my soft-box jump sessions. From a 43-second clip, the system found six different shots that it deemed memorable. Two of them were of me at the top of the box with my arms outstretched, one was when I pretended to fall on my side and another when I was performing a side plank leg lift. One more was of me mid-pushup while the last one was of my attempt at a Mario pose with bent arm and leg.

Not a bad selection, all told, but a bit obvious in its logic. It seems to think big movements or poses that are different from the rest of the clip are standouts, which isn't wrong per se. It just might not flag more subtle moments like, say, the surreptitious eyeroll of a toddler who is over their aunt putting a camera in their face.

Magic Capture is supposed to be best at situations involving sports, pets and kids. I'm pretty sure a wild squirrel at my neighborhood park doesn't count as a pet, but my attempts to use Magic Capture to get some fun shots of it yielded about three shots for each of the roughly 30-second videos I took. And all of them were blah.

I'll need more time to see if the system learns to better determine what moments are important, but for now, it does seem to save a bit of time. That is, if you can really trust AI to decide for you what special moments are, because otherwise you'll still be going back to the source video to choose for yourself, rendering any time savings moot.

Creator Suite, Pro Stable Video and Circle to Search in camera

Most people won't spend too much time with features like the Creator Suite, which provides an onscreen teleprompter and convenient project management tools. If you're after social media fame, you might find these helpful.

Google brought Circle to Search to the camera app, which lets you use your viewfinder to ask questions about things around you. This would have come in handy when a scary-looking half-engine symbol came up in my partner's Mini Cooper dashboard over the weekend, but alas, I did not have a signal. When I did end up getting connected, it took me a few minutes to get acquainted with the gesture of long-pressing the bottom bar on the screen. As someone who is used to Google Lens and Apple's Visual Intelligence, I was surprised it took Google this long to enable this feature.

Finally, I was curious to see how Pro Stable Video would perform, since I often want to record videos while biking on rocky roads. Dangerous, I know, but more on that later. To use Pro Stable Video, you have to first turn on Video Boost, then make sure you don't switch away from the 1x camera while recording. At first, I was underwhelmed by the result, as I could see the footage thud with every step I ran. But hours later I got a notification that Video Boost was complete. Google sends these to the cloud for more processing, typically to enhance brightness and reduce any shakiness.

While the end product was noticeably smoother and the thudding was mostly gone, I still found it too jittery, as the horizontal swinging motion wasn't eliminated. This is another one of those Google features that works, but I'm not sure that I should use. The scenarios where I'd enable Pro Stable Video, like motorbiking, running or paddle-boarding, are those where I really shouldn't be risking my safety (or a phone's) by holding up a camera.