Google PhotoScan for iOS digitizes your physical prints, Photos updated with machine learning-based editing

Google Photos is getting a number of updates today that improve the editing experience through machine learning and more manual controls. Additionally, a standalone PhotoScan app for iOS allows you to digitize your old physical prints with just your phone’s camera.

Google notes that a majority of old photos exist as physical copies that would be a huge hassle to manually scan. The PhotoScan app digitizes old prints by just using your smartphone’s camera. Of course, the end result is not as sharp as a scanner, but it is better than just taking a picture thanks to automatic cropping, rotating, and color correction.

PhotoScan automatically opens up the camera and positions four dots over a physical photo. You just simply move your phone across the four points and once complete can immediately move on to another photo.

There is an option to automatically upload to Google Photos, but captured images can just be saved to the camera roll or be shared with another app.

Google Photos is also getting a number of new photo editing features. The editor has more granular controls in the form of sliders for Light and Color, including: Exposure, Contrast, Whites, Highlights, and Shadows.

Auto enhance now makes “pro editor” enhancements to photos like balancing exposure and saturation to bring out the details. Filters are no longer applied generically, but rather use machine intelligence to make edits based on the individual photo. Brightness, darkness, warmth, or saturation is taken into account before applying each of the 12 styles.,

These enhancements to the photo editor are rolling out to mobile now, with Photo Scan available later today on iOS.